“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of ObamaCare nearly 15 years ago. And boy, did we ever find out. Health insurance has become a nightmare, and the American people don’t like it.

With the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, leftists like to point out that the frustration with health insurance is a very valid complaint. Never mind that a husband and father of two was killed in cold blood. “We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” says CBS contributor Céline Gounder.

Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders opined, “What I think has happened in the last few months is that what you have seen rising up is people’s anger at a health insurance industry, which denies people the healthcare that they desperately need while they make billions and billions of dollars in profit.”

Similarly, Senator Elizabeth Warren noted, “The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system. Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the healthcare to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”

However, leftists neglect to come right out and say that perhaps the Affordable [sic] Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. ObamaCare, was a terrible idea and gunked up the health insurance system beyond recognition. The ACA was passed by Congress without a single Republican vote in its favor. Before and after becoming law, the Democrats promised the American people that we could keep our doctors and our insurance if we were already happy with them and that our premiums would go down. Barack Obama repeated that so often it became PolitiFact’s 2013 Lie of the Year because what we got instead was the precise opposite. Our health insurance was utterly upended, and now even “good” insurance is not actually all that good.

As columnist Ann Coulter elaborates, “Premiums went through the roof because Democrats mandated, among other things, that insurance companies cover an array of exotic medical treatments popular with their base — e.g., men who think they’re women, people who can’t figure out how to use a condom, drug addicts, day drinkers, people who bring their emotional support Shetland ponies on airplanes, and so on.”

This governmental waste has been fought over ever since the ACA was forced through Congress. There was a chance to repeal the law in 2017, but the late Republican Senator John McCain voted against the GOP position and allowed this debacle to continue and the American people to suffer. Fast-forward to 2024, and perhaps some leftists are finally acknowledging, albeit tacitly, that insurance did not get better — even though they still want to keep or even expand the ACA.

Health insurance is suffering under the thumb of the Democrats. Like all things that they touch, it turned to garbage. The ACA is the first slide on the slippery slope toward a socialist healthcare model like that in the UK and Canada. “Free healthcare” has no incentives for excellence in doctoring, and more people die because of a lack of prompt care. Wealthy patients in those countries fly to the U.S. for more timely care and better treatment.

The ACA has played god with health insurance and hasn’t made healthcare more affordable or helped make Americans healthier. It should once again be on the chopping block.