Obamacare has been back in the headlines for the past six weeks, and not by accident. Democrats turned it into one of their big bargaining chips during the Schumer Shutdown, insisting that Republicans were on the verge of triggering a “health care crisis” simply because the COVID-era Obamacare subsidies were scheduled to expire.
What Democrats conveniently left out is the part where they themselves voted for those COVID-era subsidies — and the built-in sunset date. They weren’t “protecting” anything; they were trying to pretend their own legislative choices were somehow Republican sabotage.
And let’s not forget: it was the Democratic Party that forced Obamacare onto the country in 2010, ignoring public opposition, warnings about soaring premiums, and the basic math that never added up. They did it with zero Republican votes. The skyrocketing costs of health insurance and health care today are a direct consequence of their decisions, not anyone else’s.
Now, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08) has finally blurted out what the rest of America has known for years: Obamacare is a mess — expensive, unstable, and fundamentally broken:
https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/1990792646147928073
Appearing on MSNBC, Jeffries said, “There’s no doubt about that, Joe. We have a broken healthcare system, and unfortunately, Republicans have decided to break it even further.”
Then, of course, he had to resort to the big lie – and with zero pushback from ‘former Republican’ lawmaker and host Joe Scarborough – that Republicans are to blame.
“This relates to things that go beyond their refusal to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. In this year alone, what we’ve seen is Republicans enact the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. 14 million people are being denied their coverage as a result of the fact that they’ve passed this one big ugly bill,” he said.
Completely lost on this loser is the fact that a) even he just admitted Obamacare was broken so it makes no sense to continue funding it as is; and b) Democrats passed the original law and then during Joe Biden’s first two clueless years extended the subsidies but with a sunset date.
And by the way, those “14 million people” Jeffries referenced — and notice he carefully avoided saying Americans — are in large part undocumented immigrants who are not supposed to be eligible for Medicaid in the first place.
“We see hospitals and nursing homes and community-based health centers closing all across the country,” Jeffries added. He overlooked the fact that the Democratic Party was demanding an end to the rural hospital fund as part of their $1.5 trillion spending request. This would have resulted in the closure of hospitals and health care centers as well.
“This has been an all-out assault on the healthcare of the American people,” Jeffries said. “And the system was already broken.”
And one final note: I’ve argued before, Obamacare is working exactly the way Democrats intended — not as a stable health-care system, but as a stepping-stone to collapse. The plan was always to let Obamacare buckle under its own weight so they could swoop in and say the only “solution” is Medicare for All.
And nobody should want the federal government making all of our healthcare decisions.
