Obamacare is Falling Apart Before Our Very Eyes

One could argue that the Affordable Care Act was Obama’s most successful caper. It certainly left the biggest impact on the lives of Americans, especially when compared to anything else he has done. His economic policies were really just a continuation of his predecessor’s efforts, as were his foreign policies. And he never managed to curtail the Second Amendment in any significant way. The Affordable Care Act is his baby, and it’s probably the only thing he will be remembered for.

Unless of course it completely crumbles after he leaves office, which is looking more and more likely as time goes on. That’s because Obamacare is so unprofitable for the insurance companies, that many of them are pulling out of the system.

Participation by insurers in the Obamacare exchanges has already declined by 27 percent since the law took effect. In 2013, just before Obamacare took effect, 395 insurers offered individual market coverage. In 2016, that number dropped to 287, according to an analysis by Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Haislmaier projects that next year there will be roughly 45 fewer insurers participating in the Obamacare exchanges, a 15 percent decline from the previous year. Haislmaier, who tracks the numbers daily, says the picture will become more clear when insurance arrangements are solidified around the end of October.

And that isn’t the only problem. There are still millions of people between the ages of 18 and 34 who haven’t signed up. Obamacare desperately needs this demographic to sign up because they have fewer health problems, so their financial contribution will be a net positive for insurance companies. Yet the number of these people who have health insurance is still far below the threshold that Obamacare needs to be viable.

And as we all know, the Millennial generation is so broke that it’s not in a position to bear the burden of America’s healthcare system. Especially since the cost of health insurance premiums are skyrocketing year after year. So don’t expect young people to pick up the tab anytime soon.

If the financial well-being of the Millennial generation doesn’t improve, there are really only one of two things that are going to happen in the near future, and they both involve the collapse of Obamacare. Perhaps the Affordable Care Act is going to crumble, and Americans are going to demand that we all go back to a mostly privatized healthcare system, Obama’s legacy be damned.

On the other hand, if Obamacare falls apart, that event could be used as an excuse to roll out a fully socialized healthcare system. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. Every time socialist policies fail, their socialist engineers double down, and claim that the real problem with their policy, was that it wasn’t socialist enough.

Which has to make you wonder, was that the plan all along for the Affordable Care Act? To create a semi public healthcare system that was so expensive and so dysfunctional, that the American people would eventually come to despise it? That instead of discarding it, the public would clamor for a system that was even more socialist?

Perhaps Obama will get to keep his legacy after all.