Obamacare was supposed to help people. That was the entire selling point of the bill: Democrats insisted that it was an amazing and much-needed overhaul of America’s health insurance landscape that would benefit millions.

But it looks as if the Affordable Care Act isn’t so “affordable” after all. Instead, it appears that more than a million citizens lost their health coverage in just the last two years, all thanks to Obamacare.

That’s the conclusion of journalist John Merline, who dug into a detailed Congressional Budget Office report that was quietly released last week.

In a smart piece for “Issues & Insights,” the former USA Today editorial board member and Washington Post contributor blew the whistle on Obamacare.

“The number of uninsured climbed by 1.4 million from 2016 to 2018, according to a report out last week from the Congressional Budget Office,” Merline wrote, backed by CBO data.

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Donald Trump is the president, and no fan of the health care bill — so, of course, liberals have blamed the drop in coverage on him. Not so fast, cautioned Merline.

“But the data in that report — which was released on the same day the Mueller report came out and largely ignored — tells an entirely different story,” he said. “All of the increase in the uninsured over the past two years — all of it — is the result of the massive rate increases Obamacare’s mandates and regulations caused.”

This isn’t just conjecture. We know for a fact that Obamacare premiums have been climbing, and that it was happening long before Trump took office.

“According to the Health and Human Services Dept., premiums in the individual insurance market doubled from 2013 to 2017. They shot up again in 2018,” the journalist pointed out.

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“But for the millions of middle-class Americans who buy insurance coverage on the individual market and aren’t eligible for Obamacare subsidies, the result has been financially devastating.”

As premiums climbed, more and more people simply dropped out, because the monthly costs became too high. People who are lucky enough to receive an Obamacare subsidy aren’t hit as hard. It’s a different story for the unlucky millions who do not qualify for a subsidy and need to buy coverage out of pocket.

“But the number of people in the unsubsidized individual insurance market? From 2015 to 2018, it plunged from 9.7 million down to 6.2 million — a 36% decrease,” Merline wrote.

“So, in short, while Obamacare succeeded in making millions of people dependent on the government for health insurance, it’s done so at the expense of middle-class families who were specifically promised relief from high insurance costs,” he summarized.

It would be one thing if this were just an unanticipated side effect of the healthcare overhaul. But many observers have warned for years that making it impossible for middle-class Americans to afford to buy health insurance on their own might have been baked into Obamacare from the start.

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One of those commentators waving a red flag has been Rush Limbaugh. A long-running voice of talk radio, he warned people that Obamacare could be a back-door route to socialized medicine during Obama’s first term and repeated that warning many times since.

“[Socialized health care] has been the objective from day one,” Limbaugh said in 2015. “Fifty years ago when the left first began talking about health care, that’s where they ultimately want to go. And all of this chaos that is part of Obamacare is part of the design.”

Indeed, it’s no secret that people such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are major proponents of expanding government to run as much of health care as possible. The Affordable Care Act, with all of its problems, may have been a bridge to arrive there.

“All of the rapid cost increases, the inability of average, ordinary people to afford it. The inability of average, ordinary people to even find out what it is and to get the best policy for them,” Limbaugh said.

“The increasing difficulty in getting treatment. The increasing difficulty in actually having health care, much less health insurance, is all part of the grand design to get to total government control of health care.”

It was Obama’s own chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” If Limbaugh and Merline are right, and Democrats are trying to make health coverage more difficult for Americans so that they swallow full government-run health care when it’s proposed, we are in a disturbing place.

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