Between Obama’s two presidential election campaigns, I wonder how many times we’ve had to endure various iterations of him insisting that he absolutely, unequivocally, sincerely would never raise taxes on the middle class, and that his entire economic mission would center around making the lives of the middle-class more prosperous and reasonable. Funny how, through all of that, he mysteriously failed to mention that the entirety of his crowning legislative achievement directly relies upon crushing market signals and intentionally, forcibly, and significantly increasing the middle class’s health insurance premiums in order to pay for the new redistribution system it created. I’m sure the truth about the system’s real nature just accidentally but rather conveniently got lost in the translation somewhere, along with that pesky little “if you like your plan, you can keep it” line currently causing him so much vexation.

This isn’t news to anyone who’s been paying even an iota of honest attention this entire time, but the NYT finally seems to be catching on to the fact that the “affordable” part of the Affordable Care Act, isn’t — no, not even for the middle class.

The Chapmans acknowledge that they are better off than many people, but they represent a little-understood reality of the Affordable Care Act. While the act clearly benefits those at the low end of the income scale — and rich people can continue to afford even the most generous plans — people like the Chapmans are caught in the uncomfortable middle: not poor enough for help, but not rich enough to be indifferent to cost. …

A 60-year-old living in Polk County, in northwestern Wisconsin, and earning $50,000 a year, for example, would have to spend more than 19 percent of his income, or $9,801 annually, to buy one of the cheapest plans available there. A person earning $45,000 would qualify for subsidies and would pay about 5 percent of his income, or $2,228, for an inexpensive plan. …

David Oscar, an insurance broker in New Jersey, another high-cost state, said many of his clients had been disappointed to learn that the premiums were much more expensive than they had expected.

“They’re frustrated,” he said. “Everybody was thinking that Obamacare was going to come in with more affordable rates. Well, they’re not more affordable.”

“Little understood”? Little understood by whom, exactly, hmm? Certainly not the conservatives warning that this was going to happen all along, and now that the phenomenon is actually happening and more Americans are being made to realize that they, too, will be among ObamaCare’s “losers,” I can’t imagine that it will more readily dispose them to what we are constantly, maniacally assured are the law’s many wondrous benefits.