Welcome to the Decade From Hell, our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.





In 2007, the next president of the United States made a characteristically grand promise: America would have universal health care within five years. “We can have universal health care by the end of the next president’s first term, by the end of my first term,” said then-candidate Barack Obama to a hall full of union workers in New Jersey. His pledge might have seemed absurd coming from a candidacy not premised on “Yes, we can.” Even after Obama was sworn in and started to come to grips with the realities of passing a bill, the idea of universal coverage persisted. In June 2009, while laying out his priorities for the health care bill, Obama said, “It’s time to give every American quality health care at an affordable cost.” As late as 2011, a year after the Affordable Care Act was enacted, Ezra Klein described it as “near-universal health care.”

There are at least 72 million Americans who can tell you from personal experience that this was not accurate. In 2019, 28 million people are completely uninsured and 44 million more are underinsured—that is, their health insurance is too expensive to use. Each year, millions face gaps in coverage when they switch or lose jobs, or when they get kicked off Medicaid. Tens of millions struggle to afford their prescriptions. A third of Americans report often delaying or declining care because of cost. Though we may have understood “universal health care” to mean everyone having some kind of health insurance in 2009, our pundit and political class now acknowledges that just having insurance isn’t enough, especially when the cost of care is so high. The implication is clear: The ACA failed to bring the affordable care it promised to its intended beneficiaries.



The last decade’s misadventures in health care reform—the fight to pass the ACA; the unhinged response of its opponents; the efforts, successful and unsuccessful, to undermine the law; and the rapid, unprecedented rise of a movement to replace it with something far bigger and more radical—holds a clear lesson for the future. Passing a bill crafted with industry approval and based on ideas originated with the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney—and then insisting that it’s the most progressive thing since the New Deal and we should all be grateful for it—set the party up for the single-payer movement that’s happening now. If only this had been its intention.

You Might Be a 2010s Progressive If You Remember These Stories: Death panels. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Betsy McCaughey. “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” Were we ever so young? These are the cherished memories and memes we have of the fight to pass the ACA (which, yes, mostly happened in 2009) and the deranged opposition that persisted after its passage, all the way through the catastrophic 2010 midterms. Astroturfed activists, as well as organically mad old white people, showed up to town hall meetings to scream “Tyranny!” at Democratic members of Congress because of their plan to bring the health care bill Romney enacted as governor of Massachusetts to the rest of the nation—the very accomplishment that, at one time, entitled Romney to think of himself as a viable presidential aspirant.