“We know what works,” then-President Barack Obama said at the Global Center for Health Innovation in 2015. “We know what we have to do. We’ve just got to put aside the stale and outmoded debates. Reject failed policies. Embrace the policies that we know work. Embrace the promise of the future.”

What Obama claimed with such overweening confidence was that a few technical changes might fix most of the problems with healthcare delivery. But he and his allies pushing Obamacare were just plain wrong. His technocratic arguments that the 2010 law could bend the cost curve downward have been refuted again and again since its passage. Now, two new studies are out that explode critical assumptions people made in debate about medical bankruptcies and electronic medical records.