Commentary "As President Barack Obama leaves office, he is bequeathing his successor a colossal mess in the form of his signature legislative achievement—both from the active effort to change the American health-care system through the Affordable Care Act and from the failure to address the budgetary crisis that will overwhelm the system over the next two decades unless radical changes are made. Indeed, the extent of the health-care problems facing the next president will be far greater than we have seen previously—and vastly more difficult to fix than was the case when Obama became president in 2009.
"Obama failed to address the long-term crisis in funding Medicare even as he layered an expensive and severely flawed new benefit for all Americans on top of it. And as he fiddled, the overall national debt significantly incurred by increases in health-care spending grew without letup by about $11 trillion. That is more than the accumulated total debt that had accrued in the administration of every previous U.S. president in our history combined." . . .
