The Liberal commentator, Bill Press, wrote an interesting book at the end of Obama’s presidency in 2016, in which he criticized Obama from the Left. According to Press, Obama failed as the transformative president he vowed to be because he did not outright nationalize the American healthcare system when he had the chance to do so.
But Press was correct in highlighting Obama’s passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as being one of his biggest failures as president.
The problem for Obama and the Democrats was that the bill was totally insufficient to their goal of making health insurance more affordable. Plus, Obama failed to get a single Republican vote in the Senate, for example, they created an atmosphere of ill-will in Washington that plagued the Obama Administration until its final days in office.
Access to affordable healthcare was a leading contributor to personal bankruptcies. Getting sick in America was truly a death sentence for many—if not literally then certainly financially.
Yet, Obama’s solution didn’t make sense. The problem with America’s healthcare system is primarily the health insurance market. The way it is structured and managed creates cost overruns and harms the American people.
Simple solutions to making health insurance more affordable, like allowing for Americans to window shop for the best priced policies by going outside their states were completely ignored in favor of a policy that forced millions of Americans to pay higher premiums and possibly lose access to their preferred physicians.
Next, think about the way in which Obama forced the policy through. Rather than rolling up his sleeves and midwifing a truly bipartisan bill—something that was possible, given how many years Republican groups, like the Heritage Foundation had worked on various proposals for healthcare reform—Obama decided to work only with his own party to pass the bill.
The fight over Obamacare, by the way, not only solidified the dividing lines in Washington, D.C., but it also led to the radicalization of the Right that the Left has spent the last decade whinging about (as if the Left played no role at all).
