Was Obamacare designed to fail?

Every day, it seems like there are a dozen new headlines about the crisis facing ObamaCare. Premiums are rising faster than ever. Meanwhile, health insurance companies are abandoning the law’s exchanges left and right, unable to compete in the top-down, regulation-driven environment created by the law. Less than three years into its implementation, the law has never looked so precarious. This vindicates the critics who have predicted these outcomes for years. They were laughed out of the room when they said the law would enter into a “death spiral,” but now that looks like an inevitability. Even the law’s most ardent defenders — including its namesake, President Obama — are calling for serious reforms to stop the law from imploding. Inevitably, the solutions they demand are more regulation, more government, more top-down control of Americans’ health care. Then again, that may have always been the plan. It now seems to me that ObamaCare’s creators weren’t blind to what they were doing — they were playing a long game that is just now coming to fruition.

Dr. Barke is late to the party but he’s definitely welcome to grab a beer, sit down on a comfortable couch, and stick around. The evidence has been around since before Barack Obama became president. Yale University political science professor Jacob Hacker, known as the “father of the public option” admitted at a Tides Foundation event in 2008 that Obamacare would lead to a single-payer health care system.

Hacker said:

Someone once said to me, ‘Well, this is a Trojan horse for single payer.’ Well, it’s not a Trojan horse, right? It’s just right there! I’m telling you, we’re going to get there over time, slowly, but we’ll move away from reliance on employment based health insurance as we should. But we’re going to do it in a way that we’re not going to frighten people into thinking that they’re going to lose their private insurance.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has admitted Obamacare was designed to fail in order to clear the way for a single-payer system. Capital Research Center alumnus David Hogberg says more or less the same thing. Obamacare is in a death spiral, Hogberg says. “A death spiral occurs when not enough young and healthy people sign up for health insurance. Thanks to Obamacare’s design, a death spiral is inevitable.” The above is only a tiny portion of the evidence available, by the way. So of course Obamacare was designed to fail. It’s a gigantic con job. It was drawn up in such a way that it would eventually collapse thus theoretically clearing the way for single-payer.