Washington Post Editorial Board: “the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable”

You have to make it to paragraph 7, but, this is one hell of an admission

The shutdown conversation no one wants

As the partial government shutdown enters its second week, neither party is leveling with the American people about the hard choices required to get federal spending off a fiscally ruinous trajectory.

President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats used covid-19 to justify chasing the mirage of a European-style welfare state without raising the necessary taxes to pay for it. Now, prodded by the left, party leaders have shut down the government in a bid to permanently extend what was sold in 2021 as emergency subsidies to help people struggling during the pandemic afford health insurance.

And now they do not want to cut a dime, even back to pre-COVID levels which were too high

Yet Democrats have demanded that Republicans agree to extend the covid-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this will cost $350 billion over the next decade. These temporary benefits were included in the American Rescue Plan of March 2021 and extended the next year in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act until the end of 2025.

The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable. President Barack Obama’s signature achievement allowed people to buy insurance on marketplaces with subsidies based on their income. The architects of the program assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.

It was never meant to be affordable. And, those risk pools tended to be pretty damned big. From the get-go it was expensive for deductibles and premiums, often offset by Other People. Remember this gem from 2013?

But people with no pre-existing conditions like Vinson, a 60-year-old retired teacher, and Waschura, a 52-year-old self-employed engineer, are making up the difference.

“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.

“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”

“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Ocare was always meant as a waypoint towards Single Payer, hoping to drive the insurance companies out of business, but, what happened was that deductibles, premiums, and the cost of service went up, because, hey, if the government is going to pay for it, why not charge more? That’s how you get $500 hammers, instead of going to Lowe’s and buying a good one for $50.

Anyhow

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. Conservatives fought so hard to stop Obamacare 15 years ago because they anticipated fights like this one.

But, someone is paying for that handout. Let’s not forget that Ocare was so great that Democrats excluded Congress from participating