Double-Down

From the very beginning, I have been critical of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare). It was and is a hyperpartisan piece of legislation that the Democrats rammed through congress in 2010 using legislative rule changes and outright bribery of Democrat legislators (!) to get the bill passed. Each of the promises made for Obamacare has been proven to be incorrect and in more than a few cases, a purposeful lie. It is true that more people are insured, but that insurance has stratospheric deductibles and is subsidized at significant cost to the taxpayer. Enrollments in Obamacare are 50 percent lower than the Obama administration promised with the majority of new enrollees being old and sick. The young and healthy have stayed away. In a moment of candor, a chief architect of the legislation, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, suggested that Obamacare passed because the voting public is too ignorant to recognize its flaws. Critics (myself included) noted in 2010 that the ACA would cost too much, provide weak and overly-expensive benefits, and slowly implode. That's exactly what happened.

Here a description of the ACA from Vox, a pro-Obama, progressive, pro-Democrat website:

Healthcare.gov is on track to offer shoppers fewer options than ever before in 2017.

Major insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealth have, in recent months, taken major steps to sharply reduce participation in Obamacare's insurance marketplaces. The result, a new Vox analysis shows, is a spike in counties served by just one health insurer — and a precipitous drop in ultra-competitive areas.

There are currently 687 counties on the Healthcare.gov marketplace with just one insurer signed up to sell in 2017 — nearly four times the 182 counties that had one insurer this year.

Competitive markets, meanwhile, seem to be disappearing. In 2016, 66.8 percent of Healthcare.gov counties had three or more insurers. In 2017, only 44.3 percent of counties are on track to have this level of competition.

It's amusing to listen to Hillary Clinton discuss Obamacare. She thinks it's still viable and wants to "fix it," rather than replace it with something that works. That seems to be the Democrat credo over the past eight years—double down on failure.