Back in the aftermath of the 2016 election, as Democrats scrambled to blame Russia, James Comey, the media, and anyone else they could think of for Hillary Clinton’s loss, another factor went largely unremarked. Two weeks before voting, officials announced that premiums for health insurance plans bought on the federal exchange were going to soar 25 percent in 2017 — or, if you counted the thirteen states at the time that ran their own exchanges, 22 percent.

Would Clinton have won without it? It’s impossible to say. But it’s hard to believe that more bad news from the dysfunctional, insurer-friendly reform put in place by the sitting Democratic president, on whose legacy she was running, didn’t have some kind of effect. (“Obamacare is just blowing up. . . .  It has to be replaced with something much less expensive,” Donald Trump said when the news broke.) And it’s even harder to believe the government’s assurances that, as long as people just switched to a cheaper, less effective plan that wasn’t even an option in many places — and they figured out how to take advantage of the subsidies and tax credits they probably didn’t know about and might not even qualify for — it wouldn’t make a difference.

Well, if Mark Twain was right that history rhymes instead of repeats, then we might just be coming to the end of a stanza right now. Again, we have a major upcoming election, in this case the 2022 midterms, and again, we have a spike in health care premium costs born of Democratic failure.