Democrats called Sarah Palin a liar for fifteen straight years.
Now the man she was warning you about just proved her right on national television.
The Death Panel doctor sat down with Bill Maher – and what came out of his mouth will make every Republican who fought this law since 2009 want to frame it on the wall.
Ezekiel Emanuel Just Called His Own Obamacare Broken on Live Television
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel said it himself, on camera, in his own words.
"Do we need reform? 100%," Emanuel told Maher about Obamacare. "I'm the first person to say the system sucks, it's broken."
That's not a Republican senator.
That's the man who helped design Obamacare – the same man who served as Obama's special health policy adviser during the bill's construction, the same man who Democrats spent years holding up as proof their healthcare vision worked.
Then he did what Democrats always do – blamed Republicans for the mess he made.
Emanuel blamed Trump for giving a "big tax break" to billionaires and "throwing a bunch of people off Medicaid."
Obamacare premiums have risen over 220 percent since the law passed.
A family of four shells out $10,000 more every year for health coverage than they did the day his law was signed.
Deductibles have doubled.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo laid it last December: "There were signs from the start that Obamacare would not work, which is why not a single Republican voted for it."
The Death Panels Doctor Finally Tells the Truth About Obamacare Premiums
This is Ezekiel Emanuel – the man at the center of the death panel fight in 2009.
Back in 1996, he wrote that healthcare services for people "irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed" – with dementia patients cited as the obvious example.
That writing became the ammunition for the death panel fight.
When Obamacare was moving through Congress in 2009, Sarah Palin warned that a government-run system guided by Emanuel's philosophy would create panels of bureaucrats empowered to decide who was productive enough to deserve care – and who wasn't.
Democrats went nuclear.
They called it a lie, a fabrication, fear-mongering designed to scare seniors.
The media ran cover for them.
Emanuel himself went on television to denounce the claim and call Palin's warning "Orwellian."
But a 1996 piece by him said exactly what Palin argued – that dementia patients, people with disabilities, anyone the system deemed unable to contribute as a "participating citizen," should not be guaranteed the same care as everyone else.
A few years ago he published an essay declaring that he personally plans to refuse all medical treatment after age 75 – because living too long, in his words, is "also a loss."
This is the man who designed Obamacare from the ground up and wrote the philosophical framework that justified it.
And now, sixteen years after Obamacare became law, he's telling Bill Maher the system sucks.
Sarah Palin called it in 2009.
Republicans called it every year after that.
They were right.
Democrats Built a Broken ACA and Now They Want Trump to Pay for It
Democrats don't just own Obamacare – they ran on it for fifteen straight years.
Anyone who questioned it got called a liar, a fear-monger, or a racist.
The "death panel" warning got dismissed as a dangerous conspiracy theory, every Republican attempt at reform got blocked, and Democrats spent years screaming that the GOP wanted Americans to die.
Now their own architect is on HBO saying the system is broken – and his solution is more government control, more subsidies, more spending.
Senator Crapo called it exactly right: Democrats "created an even bigger subsidy with fewer guardrails to entice more people into a broken program" – not to fix what's wrong, but to make more Americans dependent on a system that doesn't work.
And while all of this was happening, Democrats spent years attacking Trump over healthcare.
They held press conferences outside the Capitol screaming that Republicans wanted to kill people.
They ran ads warning seniors their Medicare was on the chopping block.
In their telling, Trump's healthcare proposals were heartless, cruel, a gift to insurance companies at the expense of sick Americans.
This from the party that passed a law without a single Republican vote, fought every attempt to fix it for fifteen years, and whose own architect just sat down on HBO and called it broken.
Sources:
- Ian Hanchett, "Ezekiel Emanuel: ACA Has Done Good, But 'The System Sucks, It's Broken,'" Breitbart, April 11, 2026.
- Sen. Mike Crapo, "Obamacare Has Undermined Health Care in America," U.S. Senate Finance Committee, December 9, 2025.
- Washington Examiner Editorial, "Death Panels: Sarah Palin Was Right," Washington Examiner, October 13, 2017.
- John Nolte, "Dr. Ezekiel 'Death Panel' Emanuel Blames Republicans for Problems With Obamacare," Breitbart, October 7, 2016.