When Democrats first introduced the Affordable Care Act in 2009, the Congressional Budget Office announced that over 20 million more Americans would have healthcare coverage. This is the same Congressional Budget Office that helped kill the Senate Republican Obamacare replacement plan by announcing it would result in nearly 26 million Americans losing their healthcare coverage within 10 years.

So accurate is the CBO in their analysis of these programs?

The first year Obamacare went into effect – 2014 – over 6 million Americans were notified that their policies were being cancelled. Barack Obama tried to step in to save as many of them as possible, but most of the insurance companies said they had already spent a fortune re-tooling their policies to conform to Obamacare requirements and it would be too expensive to go back and save most of the policies that had already been cancelled.

One of the provisions of Obamacare was to establish CO-OPs in many states that would be government subsidized so they could provide more affordable healthcare insurance to many people. By the middle of 2016, over half of the CO-OPs had financially failed and went out of business.

The foundational premise that Obamacare was built upon was that millions of young healthy adults would sign up for healthcare and their premiums would help pay for the cost of providing coverage to older and less healthy adults. However, the majority of people who signed up for Obamacare policies were older, less healthy and many were signed up due to the expansion of Medicaid.

As a result, a growing number of major healthcare insurance providers began discontinuing exchange policies that were too expensive to maintain. Then the insurance providers began pulling out of one state exchange system after another.

By 2016, it was estimated that only about 11 million to perhaps has many as 15 million more Americans had healthcare coverage than before Obamacare. This is barely half of the number predicted by the Congressional Budget Office.

In June, I reported:

“Anthem is a Blue Cross and Blue Shield company and one of the largest healthcare insurance providers in the state of Ohio. They rocked the state’s healthcare world by announcing that they were pulling out of Ohio’s Obamacare exchange program in 2018. Their exit will leave around 275,000 Ohioans without healthcare coverage next year.”

“The reason for their exit is questionable, at least to me. In their official announcement, Anthem said the reason for their Ohio exit is due to the uncertainty of Obamacare’s future, considering what is happening with the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. But is that the real reason or could it be that Anthem, like so many other healthcare insurance providers, have been losing money on Obamacare exchange policies?”

“Consider this when thinking about the real reason Anthem is pulling out of the Ohio market. Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, Humana and Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Iowa have also announced they are withdrawing from Obamacare in 2018. Their reasons do include the uncertainty of the future of Obamacare, but they were also honest in laying part of the blame for their withdrawal on the heavy losses they have experienced participating in the Obamacare program.”

Anthem largely blamed the uncertainty of healthcare for their decision to pull out of the Ohio market. Yet, Anthem and several other major healthcare insurance providers have been pulling out of Obamacare exchanges for the past several years, before Republicans had the control they needed to repeal and replace Obamacare.

However, that has not stopped Anthem from announcing that they are withdrawing from more state healthcare exchanges. In the latest report:

“Anthem plans to leave the Obamacare exchange in Virginia, an announcement that comes only days after the company said it was leaving the exchanges in Nevada and Georgia.”

“The move means that people who had Anthem coverage this year will have to shop for a new healthcare plan beginning in November if they have the option, and the change in coverage could mean patients will have to see new doctors and change hospitals.”

“Other insurers, including Anthem, UnitedHealthcare, and Aetna have made similar announcements about Virginia, which would have left 50 counties in the state without an insurer to buy tax subsidized coverage from. Optima Health, however, plans to offer coverage in all of those counties and has asked for rate increases of 19.3 percent for next year.”

So, what is the reason for the latest announcement on Anthem’s withdrawal from more state exchanges?

“Anthem said Friday that the uncertainty about the future of Obamacare had led to its decision, as had an unbalanced risk pool.”

The ‘unbalanced risk pool’ is their way of saying that the foundational premise Obamacare was built upon, as mentioned above, has utterly failed to materialize. That failure is causing the entire system to become so unbalanced that collapse is eminent.

Obamacare was a failure from the very beginning and continues to be a failure. It was built upon flawed premises supported by flawed analysis of the CBO. It never did have anything to do with providing affordable healthcare. The sole purpose of Obamacare was to force a nationalized socialist program on the American people. Nationalized healthcare is failing in virtually every nation that has it and it’s failing here.

The worst part is, now that Americans have been accustomed to being enslaved by a socialist program, they don’t want to see it go, and there is nothing congressional Republicans can do to replace Obamacare with a program that will be acceptable and affordable, but too few people realize it.