Forget Obamacare subsidies — it’s time to mend or END the whole thing

Democrats shut down the government partly to force Republicans to extend COVID-era boosts in Obamacare subsidies that Dems once called “temporary” but now say are needed to keep the program viable.

This reveals what a true disaster Obamacare has been, as its critics warned even as Dems were ramming it into law with not a single Republican vote in 2010.

Blindly tossing fresh trillions down that hole is nuts: Time to fix it — or scrap it altogether.

The 10-year cost of Dems’ current demand totals almost a half-trillion dollars, to benefit primarily insurers and wealthier Americans.

Under the expiration that Democrats wrote into law, 1.6 million Americans (just 0.5% of the population) would see their subsidies return to pre-COVID levels.

That would leave their Obamacare plans so pricey that many would drop them altogether, especially those who could get cheaper and better coverage through their employers.

That exodus would push up premiums for those left in the program — precisely what Dems fear most.

Yet this goes to a fundamental problem with Obamacare (a k a, the Affordable Care Act): It was supposed to reduce costs; instead, premiums have soared nearly 80% since 2014.

So the answer isn’t to paper over the problem by boosting the national debt to keep hiking subsidies.

Congress needs to come up with a better, fairer, cheaper and more workable system.

Fact is, Obamacare was a calamity from the start: It raised taxes, destroyed the old (imperfect, but functional) private insurance market and slapped all kinds of requirements on insurers, spiking costs.

Republicans barely failed to repeal much of it in 2017, but they did manage to gut the “individual mandate” — the hefty-and-ever-growing federal fine for forgoing insurance altogether.

Other changes (by Congress, the courts and bureaucrats) further drastically reshaped the law.

What’s left is an extremely pricey, Rube Goldberg system that provides, as health-policy expert Michael F. Cannon puts it, “junk coverage.”

Without the Obamacare law, he notes, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that most people could obtain better coverage at lower premiums. (And Congress could look to cover those left out with some targeted assistance.)

Democrats would rather keep burning money than admit their huge mistake.

They insist the law left more Americans with health coverage, but that’s largely due to the Affordable Care Act’s (hugely expensive) expansion of Medicaid.

Today, Medicaid, once a safety net for the poorest of the poor, covers one in every five Americans.

The ACA’s “temporary” federal subsidies to states to expand it were originally also set to expire — but Dems have kept those going, too.

Maybe Congress could extend these subsidies one more year to keep Obamacare on life-support, but Republicans — and Democrats — absolutely need to find structural fixes (if not a complete repeal) to boost choices for the public and access to better coverage and health networks, and to lower costs.

That means addressing key ACA provisions — on essential benefits, subsidies, preexisting and expensive illnesses, the medical loss ratio, community rating, etc. — that drive costs through the roof and limit choice.

No one, Republican or Democrat, wants to deny coverage to truly sick Americans who can’t afford their own health care.

But Democrats under President Barack Obama constructed an insanely complex, low-quality, high-price, cost-shifting scheme that’s only grown worse over time.

Republicans should certainly resist Dems’ scheme to use the shutdown to extort a permanent extension of the subsidy-boosters; polls that make clear the main subsidies would remain show solid majorities in favor of letting the enhancements expire.

But GOPers must also seek deep Obamacare reform: The system needs to be saner, cheaper and more sustainable.

And if Democrats truly want to make health care better rather than simply resist anything Republican, they’ll join the effort.