Earl Pomeroy (D., N.D.), who stubbornly cast not one but two votes in favor of Obamacare in a state that has favored GOP presidential candidates by an average of 21 percentage points in the past three elections, is now running an ad in which he brazenly tries to convince his constituents that he “listened” to them. In the ad, Pomeroy says his pro-Obamacare votes were cast to “improve Medicare” – from which Obamacare would loot hundreds of billions of dollars (according to CBO projections) – and in opposition to evil insurance companies. The trouble is, the CBO estimates that in its real first dozen years (2014 to 2025) Obamacare would funnel $1 trillion from American taxpayers, through the federal government, to those very insurance companies – while mandating that Americans buy insurers’ product under penalty of law.  That’s hardly playing hardball with insurers, almost all of whom supported Obamacare.

Of course, Obamacare would also impose enough economics-defying mandates on insurers – like the requirement that they “insure” people with prohibitively expensive pre-existing conditions, while charging such people no additional premium for not having been signed up all along – to guarantee that everyone’s insurance premiums would soon become prohibitively expensive. In this way, Obamacare would ultimately kill off insurers, leaving the government as the only insurer – but it would fatten them up first.