Hold on to your britches because you’re not going to believe this one. The Washington Post Editorial Board just admitted that the so-called "Affordable Care Act," one the most notorious pieces of Obama-era legislation foisted upon consumers by legislators and the liberal media as the saving grace of American health care, turned out to be an expensive mess.
The Post tried to play both sides of the fence in the ongoing government shutdown stand off with Republicans and Democrats, the latter of which demanded “Republicans agree to extend the Covid-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it.” Then The Post ran one of the biggest plot twists ever to hit American politics in the last 15 years:
“The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] was never actually affordable.” Nope, your eyes didn’t deceive you. The architects of former President Barack Obama’s 2010 “signature achievement,” wrote The Post, “assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.”
Gee, that’s an awfully different tone than the liberal rag was striking in 2024 when the editorial board celebrated how “Obamacare is working brilliantly — for now.” That’s despite the fact that premiums for individual market plans doubled in costs and “the per enrollee cost of Medicaid expansion is nearly 60 percent greater than what experts projected,” as the Paragon Health Institute summarized in an October 2024 study.
It’s as if the newspaper detected that the proverbial statute of limitations had run out and the risk of consumers viciously prosecuting them in the public square for lying to them over the years was minimal. Over 11 years ago, the editorial board sang the praises of Obamacare’s so-called “free-market economics.” The newspaper then deflected criticism of Obama’s infamous phony pledge that “if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor:”
“Now, critics say, those people can't keep their doctors, either. Another broken promise? More proof the ACA is a disaster? Not quite: As with all of those canceled policies, this ‘outrage’ isn’t good evidence that the law is flawed, no matter what the president may have promised.”
Another 2013 news item from The Post celebrated how “Obamacare is winning.”
In 2014, once the major ACA provisions were put into place, The Post editorial board was gleefully keeping track of the disastrous law’s illusory “W’s.” “OBAMACARE'S CRITICS have had a bad week. On Thursday, President Obama announced that 8 million people have enrolled in new health insurance plans,” wrote The Post. “[T]he initial figures are encouraging, and Mr. Obama is right to insist that continued Republican demands for repeal are unproductive and unwise.”
In 2017, Post Tokyo Bureau Chief Michelle Ye Hee Lee channeled her inner Glenn Kessler and played pro-Obamacare fact-checker against President Donald Trump: “Decoding the White House spin on Obamacare ‘failures.’”
But now, the years of nonstop pro-Obamacare gaslighting and narrative-twisting that got spewed out of The Post’s printers seems to have been undone by, er, The Post itself:
This is how entitlement programs work. Once you habituate people to some generous government handout, they grow dependent on it. And it becomes politically perilous, if not impossible, to fully claw it back."
That is how the Democrat Party works. Install entitlement, blame Republicans when anyone tries to limit it in any way.
