When something doesn't work as advertised, and amounts to a lemon, you get rid of it, right? You take that defective product off the market. It happened to some cold medicine makers a few days ago.

But somehow, that common sense response doesn't apply to government programs, where human-service programs in particular are considered sancrosanct. Throw granny off the cliff, right?

But the Washington Examiner's editorial board raises an important point about one of the most sacrosanct of these sacred government cows, Obamacare.

Its headline says it all:

If Obama-Biden healthcare policies are so good, why do costs keep rising?

The costs of Obamacare and its Biden-era add-ons are becoming intolerable.

When President Barack Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) bent legislative rules to pass Obamacare 13 years ago, critics rightly scoffed at their claims that it would expand access to health insurance and control costs.

Healthcare inflation has continued to raise prices in the rest of the economy, as was always obviously going to be the case despite Democratic falsehoods, and the massive costs to taxpayers also keep growing. The latest numbers on health insurance premiums and dangerous additional levels of government debt condemn both Obamacare and President Joe Biden's policies that are driven by the same flawed assumptions.

For most people, it is the direct costs of premiums that hit hardest. KFF, a health policy think tank, reports this week that the average cost of employer-based health insurance premiums for family coverage has reached nearly $24,000. That’s 7% more than last year, nearly doubling the broader inflation rate.

That's for people who get their health insurance through their employers. If you buy it individually, as I do, well, lucky you. My health insurance -- and it's not a fancy package, it's a silver one -- went up 20% this year to $1,225.23 payable each month. Next year, it goes up another 20.17% to $1,466.20, or, roughly, a house payment in a mid-sized city. The year after, it will probably also climb, and it can climb until it takes it all.

The Democrat response? A blase 'oh, that happened.' 

Some would probably recommend that those of us who can't spare an extra $241.87 a month on health care (with no added value, by the way) 'go on welfare, drop out of the workforce, get a subsidy' to deal with that price hike, which probably isn't what a lot of people had in mind.

But they aren't going to change anything. They have their narrative about throwing grandma off the cliff so nothing can ever change..

Illegals, of course, get it all for free.

Which pretty well tells us something is very wrong with this "fix" to the health care system, given that theoretically, it was to sold to the public as a way to reduce health care costs. Like Joe Biden's border fixes, the problem is worse than ever.

The Examiner points to the problem of indiscriminate subsidies as driving up costs:

A big driver of costs, under Obamacare as a whole and due to Biden’s regulations, is the nearly indiscriminate use of government subsidies. Biden keeps trying to force unnecessary coverage onto people who don’t want or need it, such as requiring elderly men to buy insurance that covers pregnancy services. Both Obama and Biden ration the supply of care by deterring innovation that otherwise would occur through research and development.

Higher subsidies chasing rationed services is a recipe for what always happens when expanded demand chases limited supply: price hikes.

Meanwhile, Biden is pushing rules changes, reversing President Donald Trump’s, that make things even worse. Using a “government knows best” approach, Biden wants to outlaw inexpensive plans that young, healthier people choose, on the theory that ordinary people don’t know what’s good for them.

No less important is that Obama and Biden’s policies are hurting workers. The subsidies they push come from the federal Treasury, which means taxpayers. The result is upward pressure on tax rates and government debt that slows down prosperity now and burdens future generations.

Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute wrote last week that numbers from the Congressional Budget Office show the federal government spent a “jaw-dropping” $1.8 trillion this year on healthcare subsidies. That number is rising rapidly. In the next 10 years, government officials are set to spend $25 trillion on such subsidies. Those subsidies alone, not to mention all the private sector healthcare costs, are projected to be as large a percentage of the economy as the entire U.S. finance and insurance sector was at the start of this decade.

 Apparently enough people are taking these subsidies that it's replacing the finance and insurance sector in terms of its size in the economy. Other countries, even the most eurotrashy of them, don't have those problems. But we do. And there's a resolute determination to not look at this problem despite the fact that it's a problem screaming for a free market solution. We know where the Democrats are on this -- slurping from the trough and worshipping their sacred cows.

Where are the Republicans? 

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