This Sunday marks four years since President Barack Obama, with 22 pens, signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in to law. In honor of the anniversary, let’s take a look at the law as it was then, and what it’s become today.
We hear a lot about how people are increasingly displeased with the health care law. This is nothing new.
A week before Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the Pew Research Center found that 47 percent of respondents generally opposed "the health care bills being discussed in Congress."
By September, another Pew poll found that 45 percent disapproved of "the health care legislation passed by Barack Obama and Congress." In March 2011, Gallup found, 44 percent of respondents felt it was a "bad thing" that Congress had passed the Affordable Care Act.
Today, over 50 percent oppose the law, and disapproval is at the highest level in a year.
When it passed, Millennials approved of the law more than any other age group. Now 56 percent disapprove of it, and overall only 25 percent of those who have selected a plan in the exchanges are between the ages of 18 and 34.
The Affordable Care Act of 2010 was going to insure the majority of the uninsured. Premiums would be lowered, and Obamacare absolutely would not change existing insurance plans if you didn’t want it to.
Two more failures: The health care law has not lowered the cost of insurance, and millions of people have been unable to keep their plans or their doctors. We don’t know about the number of uninsured, but studies suggest that many of the people who have enrolled in the exchanges were previously covered.
Democrats will be running on health care reform in 2014. They really have no other choice. But they’re not running on the "Affordable Care Act" of 2010. They’re running on Obamacare—and that’s not a plus. It’s a minus.