Fourteen years after passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), North Carolina has received approval for a program to receive more than $10 billion from the federal government over the next two years to reimburse hospitals for forgiving medical debt.

Why is this program necessary? We were promised in 2010 that Obamacare would lower healthcare costs and make “affordable healthcare” a right, not just a privilege.

Nearly a decade and a half after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, healthcare is so expensive and burdensome that North Carolina leaders deemed it necessary to beg the broke federal government for more than $10 billion to relieve the medical debt of roughly 2 million North Carolinians.

Of course, this program should serve as more evidence of Obamacare’s failure to deliver affordable healthcare, but Gov. Cooper and NCDHHS Secretary Kody Kinsley will never acknowledge that.

As I’ve written before, government does not make things affordable. Indeed, the more involved government is in trying to make something affordable, the more rapidly will the cost of those items rise.

What do the numbers tell us about Obamacare’s failure to bring down healthcare costs? From its passage in 2010 to 2022 (the latest data available):

  • Total healthcare expenditures have ballooned by 72% (compared to 34% cumulative inflation during that time)
  • Per capita healthcare expenditures have risen by 61%
  • Per enrollee, direct purchase health insurance expenditures have climbed by a whopping 263%
  • And what about those limits on out-of-pocket expenses Obamacare promised? Out-of-pocket expenditures have risen a dramatic 56%

We’ve seen it a million times: Government intervention makes a problem worse, which causes further intervention to supposedly fix the new problems, which makes the problem worse still, etc.

Now North Carolina will rely on more than $10 billion from a federal government $35 trillion in debt to pay off medical debt made worse by federal government policy.

When will we finally learn that markets, not politics, are the real problem-solver?