Roy Cooper Just Admitted the Affordable Care Act Isn’t Actually Affordable Anymore

Roy Cooper wants to go on a tour. He’s calling it the “make stuff cost less tour,” which sounds like something a middle schooler would name after a civics class assignment. But here’s the thing that makes this whole circus worth watching: Cooper, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate from North Carolina, just said the quiet part out loud about the Affordable Care Act.

During election coverage on Tuesday, the former governor admitted that people on the ACA can no longer afford it. Let that sink in for a second. The Affordable Care Act, the crown jewel of Democratic healthcare policy, the legislation they defended with religious fervor for over a decade, is now so expensive that even its supporters are acknowledging people can’t pay for it. And those who manage to hang on? They’re stuck with policies that cost more and cover less, buried under deductibles so high you’d need a second mortgage just to use your insurance.

This isn’t some conservative talking point anymore. This is coming straight from a Democratic candidate’s mouth.

Cooper’s solution, predictably, involves fighting insurance companies and restoring subsidies. Because apparently the answer to government intervention that failed is more government intervention. It’s the political equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire and wondering why it keeps spreading. We’ve been down this road before. The ACA promised affordability and delivered the opposite. It promised you could keep your doctor and that turned out to be fiction too.

The free market didn’t create this mess. Government mandates did. When you force insurance companies to cover everything under the sun, tell them they can’t charge based on risk, and then add layers of regulations that would make a Soviet bureaucrat blush, prices go up. It’s not rocket science. It’s basic economics, the kind that doesn’t require a PhD to understand.

Cooper says Washington needs to help reduce costs instead of making them go up. He’s right about the problem but completely wrong about the cause. Washington is the reason costs are climbing. Every subsidy, every mandate, every regulation adds cost somewhere in the system. Someone always pays. Usually it’s the middle class families who make too much to qualify for subsidies but not enough to absorb these premium increases without real pain.

Here’s what drives me crazy about this whole conversation. Conservatives have been saying this for years. We warned that the ACA would increase costs. We warned that subsidies would create dependency and distort the market. We warned that government control of healthcare would lead to fewer choices and higher prices. And we were called heartless for it.

Now Cooper wants credit for acknowledging reality? He’s planning to roll out policy ideas next week about healthcare, which probably means more of the same failed approach wrapped in different packaging. More subsidies funded by taxpayers. More regulations strangling competition. More government inserting itself between patients and doctors.

The real solution isn’t complicated. Get government out of the way. Let people buy insurance across state lines. Remove mandates that force everyone to buy coverage they don’t need. Let the free market work. Competition drives prices down. Always has, always will. But that requires trusting individuals to make their own choices, and Democrats can’t stomach that idea.

Cooper’s admission is accidentally honest, and I’ll give him that much. The Affordable Care Act has become unaffordable. Sometimes the truth slips out when you’re too focused on sounding sympathetic. The question is whether voters in North Carolina will reward him for stating the obvious or hold him accountable for supporting the policies that created this disaster in the first place.

Related: Tim Walz Let Billions Vanish While Silencing the People Who Tried to Stop It