As President Obama nears the end of his time in office, his signature achievement — Obamacare — is collapsing into chaos.

Obamacare’s inevitable collapse is beginning to impact the 2016 election. Last week, Bill Clinton’s frank and honest assessment of Obama’s signature achievement turned failure was a major PR migraine for the Clinton campaign.

“Democrats are going to claim that it was no good because it didn’t go far enough.”

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“So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world,” Clinton said.

While it may be too late for Obamacare’s collapse to become a defining topic of the 2016 election, it will surely be a defining domestic political issue by the time the 2018 midterms roll around.

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As more private insurers abandon their involvement in the program and more people lose coverage — and those who have coverage continue to face ever-spiraling costs — fixing Obama’s signature mess will quite literally become a public health crisis.

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Clinton has pledged to “protect and expand” Obamacare, while criticizing alleged congressional Republican intransigence for wanting to repeal the laughably named Affordable Care Act, rather than try to make it work better for more people.

This is undoubtedly a preview of what the country can expect in 2018 should Clinton become president, and the argument provides Democrats a distinct advantage. As more and more Americans suffer as Obamacare collapses, the Democrats will likely accuse Republicans of putting politics above people, pursuing a personal vendetta against Obama’s legacy at the expense of the health of the American people.

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The risk to Republicans in such a fight is as real as the suffering Obamacare is causing Americans. Sixteen of the 23 nonprofit co-ops created under Obamacare to provide health insurance have collapsed. The House recently passed the “CO-OP Consumer Protection Act of 2016,” designed to protect Americans who lost their health care coverage when their local co-op collapsed from being forced to pay the Obamacare penalty.

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Meanwhile, private health insurance companies are drastically scaling back their involvement with Obamacare. Aetna announced in August that it would abandon most of the health exchanges after a $300 million loss this year from individual plans. UnitedHealthcare and Humana have also retreated from their involvement in the Obamacare exchanges — UnitedHealthcare has left 31 of 34 exchanges in which it had a presence.

Without the participation of private health insurance companies and young Americans, who are largely opting out of participating in the program, Obamacare continues to be an ever-expanding bottomless pit of debt and despair.

A March report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that Obamacare would cost $136 billion more than it had predicted the previous year — it also reported that 9 million more people would have work-based coverage if the law had never been passed in the first place. Premiums rose by an average of roughly 16 percent this year compared to last year, according to estimates by Ed Haislmaier of The Heritage Foundation.

By 2018, the situation could be even worse. “I’m betting that we are going to be looking at very large premium increases in 2017,” said Bob Moffit, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, who was an expert witness for the GOP in 2009 while the ACA was still a legislative embryo. “That’s going to have a devastating effect on the entire system,” he said.

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If the Democrats are able to successfully frame Republicans’ desire to repeal and replace Obamacare as some kind of cold-hearted indifference to the suffering the law is already causing, Republicans could find themselves in a PR nightmare.

There is evidence some Republicans are sensing the danger of the oncoming battle. Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, said Republicans would “certainly” consider working with Clinton to fix Obamacare.

“She would be able to look at what has failed,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “Obviously, we wouldn’t be closed-minded. The bottom line is: How do we take care of people and make it affordable for them?”

But despite whatever pressure Democratic propaganda about heartless Republicans may place on the congressional GOP, the notion that it could work successfully with Clinton to “fix” Obamacare is belied by Clinton’s vision of what an Obamacare that “works” looks like.

“President Clinton was dead right when he called Obamacare ‘the craziest thing in the world,'” Eddie Zipperer, a political science professor at Georgia College, told LifeZette. “It always has been, [but] Democrats are going to claim that it was no good because it didn’t go far enough,” he said. “They’ll be all-in on socialized medicine.”

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Indeed, Hillary Clinton has promised to massively expand Medicaid access and coverage, to provide government-funded abortions for all, to allow illegal aliens to participate in government health care exchanges, and to provide a fully government-funded “public option” aside from Obamacare and private health insurance. Given the country’s already astronomical debt, implementing Clinton’s vision for an Obamacare that works is an Obamacare that remains an economic catastrophe.

Moffit, however, thinks it’s unlikely that the Democrats would truly be able to pressure Republicans into working with Clinton on Obamacare. “The truth is that the Democrats own Obamacare lock, stock, and barrel,” Moffit said. “Why should any Republican help the Democrats fix what they have broken?”