For the second week in a row, Democrats are blocking roughly a quarter of federal spending, causing what Washington calls a government “shutdown,” unless Congress gives additional billions of taxpayer dollars to private health insurance companies via Obamacare. Republicans have never taken responsibility for Obamacare, and they should not start.

Obamacare offers junk insurance at outrageous premiums. In 2021, Democrats created temporary COVID-19 emergency premium subsidies for families earning $130,000 to $600,000 annually because even wealthy people struggle to afford Obamacare. These supposed “tax credits” are just checks the government sends to private health insurance companies. Thankfully, those temporary subsidies expire at the end of this year.

Democrats want to make those subsidies permanent because if they disappear, it would reveal that Obamacare’s excessive premiums and junk coverage are unpopular, as they have been from the beginning.

Public opinion turned against the first draft the moment Democrats introduced it in June 2009. After Democrats passed the “Affordable Care Act” by a single vote, voters gave them a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms.

Congress has since repealed dozens of unpopular ACA provisions. The long-term care program? Gone. The death panel? Gone. “Every single one of the funding mechanisms to help offset the cost of the bill has been repealed,” says health reporter Julie Rovner. “The individual mandate is gone. Most of the industry-specific taxes are gone. The Cadillac tax … is gone.”

Dozens of other provisions were so unpopular that bureaucrats and judges rewrote them, in many cases subverting the Constitution by legislating without Congress.

Ignoring the ACA’s spending limits, the Obama and Biden administrations issued billions of dollars in illegal subsidies to millions of ineligible people, including members of Congress, and diverted funds from public health and elsewhere to insurance companies.

The ACA proved so unworkable and unpopular that it no longer exists. What we now have is “Obamacare” (Justice Antonin Scalia called it “SCOTUScare”), an illegitimate law that no Congress ever passed or could have passed.

Obamacare’s authors knew it would be unpopular. In 2013, ACA architect Jonathan Gruber admitted that Democrats structured the ACA by hiding its tax hikes within private health insurance premiums to hide its unpopularity. Had they made these measures transparent, he said, “The bill would not have passed.” Mr. Gruber infamously credited the ACA’s passage to “the stupidity of the American voter.”

Even the supposedly popular parts — the rules prohibiting exclusions or higher premiums for preexisting conditions — are unpopular. Former Biden economic adviser Michael Geruso has shown that those provisions are, in fact, limiting access to medications, top doctors and top hospitals at a cost to chronically ill patients of thousands of dollars per year. Polling consistently shows that when voters learn Obamacare reduces quality, even Democrats oppose it.

Obamacare then charges people double for junk coverage. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that without Obamacare, most people could obtain better coverage at lower premiums. Most enrollees could buy “a comprehensive major medical policy” with “lower deductibles or wider provider networks” than Obamacare plans, at premiums “as much as 60 percent lower” than the lowest-cost Obamacare plans.

Democrats fear that if consumers see their full premium (i.e., the full cost of Obamacare’s regulations), they won’t voluntarily sign up for overpriced junk.

Democrats see subsidies as the solution. They want premium subsidies for households earning up to $600,000 at a 10-year cost of $440 billion. Households earning $200,000 annually could receive subsidies of $12,000.

Democrats who once counted on the stupidity of the American voter are now banking on the stupidity of Republican lawmakers — all because they won’t acknowledge that Obamacare is an unaffordable failure.

Rather than give even more money to inefficient private insurance companies, Republicans and Democrats should remove barriers to high-quality, low-cost coverage. They should expand access to health insurance exempt from Obamacare’s unpopular regulations via renewable term health insurance and health plans available in U.S. territories.

To spur Congress to act, President Trump should unilaterally end the illegal exemption from Obamacare that President Obama granted Congress.