The Wall Street Journal
Sen. Rick Scott
October 9, 2025

Congressional Democrats have said the quiet part out loud: They want the federal government to keep cutting massive checks to insurance companies forever, using your tax dollars to shore up the sinking ship of ObamaCare. They’ve even shut down the government to demand it.

ObamaCare didn’t deliver on its promise of healthcare affordability and stability. President Obama’s promise that “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” was proved to be a lie by 2013. His promise to bring down healthcare costs—with savings of $2,500 a year for every American family and $200 billion for the federal government—was no more truthful.

To keep ObamaCare afloat, the federal government has propped it up with hundreds of billions of dollars in handouts directly to the insurance industry while failing to lower costs. These handouts lacked any accountability or eligibility requirements, opening them up to fraud, waste and mass confusion that lined the pockets of insurance companies and brokers, and failing Americans who need help. The whole system is misconceived—but Washington has done its best to hide that from the American people.

To fix America’s broken health-insurance system, we need to begin by exposing the truth about ObamaCare’s failures. Average monthly premiums per person skyrocketed from $242 in 2013, the year before ObamaCare was enacted, to nearly $600 in 2019—an increase in costs of about 140% in six years. In the past five years, costs have continued to rise, with 2026 premiums expected to jump 15% over 2025. The federal government has continuously increased subsidies to insurance companies to hide ObamaCare’s affordability failures and spare Americans on ObamaCare from its skyrocketing costs—while everyone’s premiums, copayments and deductibles have soared.

Since 2014, the share of ObamaCare premium costs paid for by the federal government has risen from 68.4% to 80.3%. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2023 and 2024 alone, the federal government paid more than $200 billion to insurers to keep premium increases artificially low. This is an unsustainable system that feeds billions of taxpayer dollars to insurance companies. The federal government spent $111.2 billion on ObamaCare subsidies last year, sending checks to insurance companies for 19 million recipients. Reports indicate five million of those recipients were ineligible. That means the average American paid $327 of tax dollars last year on these subsidies, of which some $82 covered fraudulent enrollment.

It is time to end this madness by lowering the cost of healthcare, encouraging innovation at the state level, stopping fraud and waste in the system, increasing competition in the health insurance and provider markets, and giving the American people the ability to spend healthcare dollars in the way that best meets their individual needs.

We can do this without kicking people off their health insurance or subjecting families to higher costs. The Democrats prefer to keep funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to insurance companies while the American people get less choice, smaller provider networks, poorer outcomes, higher insurance premiums, higher copayments and higher deductibles. Who are the Democrats protecting here? It isn’t the taxpayers and it isn’t patients who rely on ObamaCare.

Mr. Scott, a Florida Republican, is chairman of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. He is a former chairman and CEO of Columbia/HCA, a hospital company.