According to The Hill, Republican critics of Obamacare are altering their criticism of the law to account for its success in lowering the percentage of uninsured Americans.
GOP critics initially argued that Obamacare "had not made a dent in the size of the uninsured population."
But Republicans, the website says, "are now acknowledging that an expansion has taken place, but are pointing to the quality of the insurance that people are gaining to argue that the law is still bad for the country."
As an example of supposedly questionable Republican criticisms of the law, The Hill quoted a comment that House Speaker John Boehner made Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press": "Yeah, you know why there's more people insured? Because a lot more people are on Medicaid."
Giving people Medicaid "is almost like giving them nothing, because you can't find a doctor that will see Medicaid patients," Boehner said. "And so where do they end up? The same place they used to end up, in the emergency room."
Boehner's comment was correct as, on Monday,
USA Today reported that three-quarters of emergency-room physicians say that "they've seen emergency-room visits surge since Obamacare took effect — just the opposite of what many Americans expected would happen."
Among the major reasons cited for the surge were the fact that many doctors won't accept Medicaid because of its low reimbursement rates.
Critics of the law say that since its passage in 2010, they have consistently argued that Obamacare would be an unworkable mess and that much of the gain in coverage would come from the
expansion of Medicaid, a program that provides poor-quality care and is on the verge of fiscal collapse.
They say the problem is that the expansion in coverage has been relatively small and has come at a very high cost.
Writing in Forbes,
Galen Institute president Grace Marie Turner recently pointed to statistics showing that one year before the passage of Obamacare, the uninsured rate among U.S. adults was 14.4 percent. In the fourth quarter of 2014, it fell to 12.9 percent.
"So our health sector has been thrown into turmoil, millions of people have lost their private health plans, $1 trillion in new taxes has been imposed on individuals and businesses, and the uninsured rate has dropped a net of 1.5 percent," Turner wrote.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.