Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) chose extending “temporary” Obamacare COVID pandemic tax credits as their hill to die on in the October 2025 government shutdown showdown with President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.

But the ugly reality behind Democrats’ hyperbolic rhetoric predicting soaring monthly premiums and millions of Americans losing coverage is the fact Obamacare has been a disaster for the American health care system, according to multiple voices across the political spectrum. Thus, whether they realize it or not, Schumer and Jeffries are now stuck holding the skunk.

Least expected to be among those critical voices was an October 5 missive from the editorial board of The Washington Post — long the hometown voice of the Government Party in American politics, but more recently experiencing a Jeff Bezos-directed slow-motion re-introduction to reality.

“The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] 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,” the Post editorial board wrote.

But that fundamental failure underlying Obamacare was not all on the Post editors’ minds that day, as they continued:

“To salvage the program, Democrats expanded subsidies to entice more people to buy plans. Many poor families wound up getting insurance for free, and the rolls grew: 24 million people now have coverage through the ACA exchanges. People earning more than 400 percent of the poverty line — about $129,000 for a family of four — would see their subsidies go away.

“Democrats picked this fight because they see health care as a winning issue. A Post poll, conducted on the first day of the shutdown, found that 71 percent of Americans say federal insurance subsidies should be extended while 29 percent say they should end as scheduled. Just as significantly, the question divides Republicans: 38 percent support extending the subsidies, and 62 percent want them to end.”

And then, in a statement that was even less expected than the admission of Obamacare’s “real problem,” came this paragraph:

“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.”

Whether the Post editors realized it or not, with that paragraph, they endorsed the Right’s fundamental critique of the Welfare State since its advent in Bismarck’s Germany in the late 1800s. Somewhere, a stunned former President Ronald Reagan, who often declared federal programs to be “the closest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this Earth,” is declaring his amazement that “they finally get it.”

Even if Democrats succeed through the shutdown in salvaging some sort of interim preservation of the “temporary” Obamacare tax credit subsidies, think tankers on the Right point to a host of additional profoundly serious flaws in the government health care system.

“Rarely in public policy have we witnessed such a radical disparity between high-profile promises and real-world performance. Obama said that his signature bill would bend the health care cost curve downward. Instead, aggregate health care spending has soared,” Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Robert Moffit told The Washington Stand.

Moffit spent eight years as a senior Reagan administration political appointee handling congressional relations at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he learned valuable insider lessons about the federal workforce and the government health care system. At Heritage, Moffit became one of the most widely respected and quoted conservative health care experts.

“Recall that Obama said that the average family would see a $2,500 reduction in their yearly health costs, but instead exchange premiums exploded and family deductible increases were crazy. While Obama claimed his bill would create robust choice and competition in the individual markets, in fact, choice and competition sharply declined, leaving many families at the mercy of a monopoly or a duopoly,” Moffit continued.

“Worse, most Obamacare plans had narrow networks, limiting patient access to preferred doctors, hospitals, and specialists. Meanwhile, taxpayers have been forced to pay for Obama’s massive failure in health care cost control through ever higher health insurance subsidies, now reaching families with six figure incomes, while simultaneously funding a massive expansion of Medicaid, a poorly performing welfare program,” he said.

Economic Policy Innovation Center Budget Policy Director Matthew Dickerson offered additional insights into the problems ravaging Obamacare, telling TWS that “the Biden COVID tax credits are an attempt to paper-over the failures of Obamacare to deliver affordable health care that people want to purchase.”

Dickerson also pointed out that “giving hundreds of billions in subsidies to big insurance companies may shift costs to the taxpayers, but it won’t solve the problems caused by Obamacare. Premiums would still increase for most families, according to the filings from the insurance companies.”

He continued, “The Biden COVID Credits were always meant to be temporary, based on the partisan law signed by President Biden. When the extra subsidies paid to insurance companies expire, the taxpayers will still pay for more than 80% of the premium costs for a typical enrollee and an even greater share for low-income families.”

Another devastating analysis of Obamacare’s multiple failures comes from The Paragon Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank headed by former White House Special Assistant for Economic Policy under Trump Brian Blase. In an analysis entitled “The Falsehoods of Obamacare,” the Paragon study pointed to multiple unfulfilled promises from the program.

One of those promises was that the program would help save many lives that would otherwise be lost due to inadequate access to health care, but, according to Paragon, “life expectancy fell three consecutive years for the first time in nearly 100 years” following Obamacare’s implementation.

Another such failed promise spotlighted by Paragon was that Obamacare would make shopping for health care insurance easy. In fact, “the [Obamacare] portal was one of the most notoriously unreliable websites ever launched.”

Yet another failed promise, according to Paragon, was the claim Obamacare would boost the individual coverage field into a competitive, robust, growing marketplace. The actual result has been “enrollment was less than half of expectations, with higher premiums and deductibles and more restrictive provider networks than expected through 2020.” Things are little improved in this respect in 2025.

Finally, in perhaps the best-known failed Obamacare promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it and if you like your doctor, you can keep him or her as well.” The reality has proven to be that “millions of people had their plans canceled and lost access to their doctors.”