ObamaCare Is a Money Pit for Taxpayers

How dare they trample the reputation of our greatest President.

ObamaCare Is a Money Pit for Taxpayers

A new study shows extending subsidies would be reckless.

By Ge Bai and Elizabeth Plummer

Dec. 28, 2025 4:00 pm ET

Congress may yet extend ObamaCare “enhanced” premium subsidies. A new study shows why that would be a reckless act toward taxpayers.

Using health insurers’ mandatory filings, our study, published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, shows that the ObamaCare individual market has become a money pit for taxpayers. In 2024 they paid nearly 80% of the premiums for subsidized plans—compared with only 30% in 2014.

Taxpayers paid more than $114 billion directly to insurers in 2024—one-third more after inflation than in 2023, more than double the amount in 2020 (before the enhanced subsidies), and more than six times as much as in 2014. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this acceleration continued in 2025.

Why? Through regulations, ObamaCare banned affordable insurance options and destroyed independent physician practices, damaging the insurance and provider markets. Consolidation, administrative bloat, high prices and soaring premiums followed. Our study shows the correlation between premium growth and subsidy growth is nearly perfect.

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That’s by design. Subsidies are calculated so that the premiums paid by subsidy-eligible enrollees for benchmark plans fall within a set percentage of their income, thereby transferring the financial exposure from rising premiums to taxpayers. In 2021 Congress expanded subsidy eligibility to higher-income households and lowered income caps for others, further burdening taxpayers. In August 2022, it extended these Covid-era subsidies through 2025.

Zero or near-zero premium plans proliferated as the subsidies approached or exceeded the premiums. In 2024, 90% of subsidy-eligible enrollees had access to plans with net premiums of $10 a month or less.

Higher enrollment brings more taxpayer dollars to insurers and brokers while providing political talking points for Democrats. It also creates incentives for fraud, as evidenced by findings from the Justice Department, the Paragon Health Institute and the Government Accountability Office. In a GAO report, 23 of 24 fictitious applications were approved for premium subsidies, and 18 were still covered a year later.

Reckless subsidies lured legitimate enrollees into ObamaCare plans who would otherwise have used employer-sponsored insurance, crowding out private funding with taxpayer dollars. We found that the market size for unsubsidized ObamaCare plans shrank by a quarter, from $23 billion in 2014 to $17 billion in 2024. ObamaCare is a poor value, a product few Americans would voluntarily purchase without subsidies.

Congress has thrown taxpayers under the bus—forcing them to pay for nearly the entire ballooning cost of subsidized ObamaCare plans, including fraudulent ones. Taxpayers in employer-sponsored plans are also saddled with higher premiums, higher prices and stagnant care delivery caused by ObamaCare’s market distortions.

What Congress sold to the American people as targeted assistance for lower-income families has become a broad entitlement with no spending limit. ObamaCare’s structural flaws and subsidy design are a direct attack on taxpayers’ hard work, sacrifice and discipline. Taxpayers, who keep the economy running and sustain care for the most vulnerable, deserve empathy and justice.

Ms. Bai is a professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University. Ms. Plummer is a professor of accounting and medical education at Texas Christian University.