By shutting down the government for more than a month to protect Obamacare, Democrats may have opened the door to its repeal. That would be a fitting ending to the failure they birthed 15 years ago.

The Democrats’ entire justification for keeping the government closed was to force an extension of (temporary) enhanced “Affordable Care Act” subsidies added during COVID-mania, which they now claim will create an affordability crisis if allowed to expire.

The irony might have been lost on Democrats, but President Donald Trump saw an opportunity to target this public policy failure once again, suggesting lawmakers scrap Obamacare’s massive subsidy scheme – which directs billions of dollars to insurance companies –  and give the money directly to people so that, as Trump put it on Truth Social, “THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE.”

The fact that this debate is even happening is proof that Obamacare has massively failed to live up to its grand promises.

After all, when Obama sold his health care reform plan to the public in 2009, he said that “It will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance. And it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.”

He said that “reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan,” that “the middle class will realize greater security, not higher taxes,” and that it will “slow the growth of health care costs” and “reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.”

None of that turned out to be true. Health care costs didn’t slow. Premiums didn’t go down. Nearly 30 million adults still say health care is difficult to afford or access.

Annual deficits have exploded since Obamacare became law. Medicare and Medicaid are still rife with waste, fraud, and abuse.

And while the number of uninsured has gone down, that’s entirely the result of more people becoming dependent on the government for health care. In 2009, just 26% of Americans were on some form of government insurance. By 2023, that number topped 34%.

Fewer than 12% got coverage through Medicaid – the program specifically designed for the poor – before Obamacare. Today, nearly 16% do. Meanwhile, the share of people with private insurance has dropped from 59% to 58%.

And, despite all the claims that Obamacare would “fix” the private insurance market, it’s managed mainly to enrich the insurance industry. Net income went from $4 billion in 2015 to $31 billion by 2020, and profit margins went from 0.6% to 3.8%. And their stock prices? Well, check out the chart below.

When Obama made his pitch for Obamacare, he thought he’d be remembered as the man who once and for all solved health care.

“I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last,” he said.

Tell that to the Democrats who shut down the government for more than a month to “fix” an affordability crisis that Obamacare itself is causing today.

The second irony is that the Democrats’ shutdown actually opens the door to scrapping Obamacare.

As the Heritage Foundation’s Bob Moffit told The Washington Stand’s Mark Tapscott, “Democrats have made a strong case that President Barack Obama’s signature legislation was a major policy failure” and created “a golden opportunity to change the trajectory of the health care debate.”

Whether Republicans are smart enough to seize the moment is far from certain – they’ve blown many, many chances to fix the nation’s health care system.

But Tapscott notes, citing a congressional relations veteran, “genuine health care reforms are a real possibility because there is even support for such progress among some Democratic lawmakers.”

Having Democrats pave the way for Obamacare’s repeal would be a perfect end to Obama’s miserable legacy.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board