The Affordable Care Act is in trouble and although there are no GOP fingerprints on it, emerging conventional wisdom has them on the hook for subsidies that are set to skyrocket. Rather than just throwing good money after bad, they have an opportunity to illuminate the law’s failure and tout that free markets are a healthier solution. 

“We told you so” isn’t much of a pitch to voters who are hurting. Congress, though, can’t stop the cycle of so-called health care reform that makes services worse and more expensive without an honest accounting. The ACA is a flawed prescription for America’s ills, as were Medicare and HMOs. 

When Medicare passed in 1965, it was projected to cost around $12 billion by 1990 and ended up with a price tag about ten times that. Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy sponsored the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 to improve health care, too. Soon Democrats were railing against HMOs, and horror stories filled the airwaves.

“Bad laws,” President Lincoln said in his 1838 Lyceum address at Springfield, Illinois, “should be repealed as soon as possible. Still, while they continue in force … they should be religiously observed.” The sentiment is often summarized as: The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

Lincoln’s goal wasn’t to cause pain, but to recognize that laws must be executed as written to prompt Congress to change them. Although the easiest way for Washington to address mistakes is to paper them over with greenbacks, the $37 trillion national debt shows that’s not a long-term solution. 

Making the case against Obamacare with premiums set to balloon is a hard sell, but it’s important for the GOP to do with the midterm elections looming. In Friday’s Politico poll, Democrats led Republicans by nine points on whom American adults trust to bring down health care costs. Pointing out the ACA’s Armageddon can close that gap.

According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, an additional two million Americans won’t be able to afford health care next year without the subsidies. A health research group, KFF, found that the average participant could see premiums more than double.

That’s not the “affordable care” that Mr. Obama promised. He told Congress in 2009 that his plan would “cost around $900 billion over 10 years, less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” That metric was salesmanship, as was giving the Congressional Budget Office data that ensured it’d back the figure, pushing off the reckoning. 

The Covid pandemic’s impact provided an opportunity to push off Obamacare’s crash. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 helped people pay premiums during the lockdowns, eliminated the income cap, and paid the full Cobra bill for people who’d been given pink slips.

Those payments were scheduled to sunset in two years, when it was expected that the pandemic would end. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 extended them until the end of 2025. Now the clock is ticking, and Democrats have decided that Republicans ought to bail out a law that they have opposed for 15 years.

Not a single Republican voted for the ACA. In a 2010 victory lap, President Obama mocked their warnings that the law would herald “Armageddon” rather than lower costs. The president joked that citizens would be reading “old People magazines” at the “doctor’s office” and see that he was right.

“You’ll say,” Mr. Obama predicted, “‘Hey, this is the same doctor, same plan. It wasn’t Armageddon.’” Mr. Obama’s line that Americans could keep their plans and physicians if they liked them was named Politifact’s 2013 Lie of the Year. He apologized for the deceptive sales pitch in November of that year.

“You know Republicans are in trouble,” Senator Paul Douglas, a Democrat who represented Illinois in the 1950s and 1960s, is said to have quipped, “when they start quoting Lincoln.” Using the specter of exploding costs, as Honest Abe said, can prod Congress to fix Mr. Obama’s bad law and give Americans something better in its place.