The Republican Party is in trouble with many voters, who see that failing to act when action is required is just as bad as doing the wrong thing instead of the right one.

One of the principal reasons Republicans won control of Congress was its opposition to the Affordable Care Act, known popularly as “Obamacare.” But that hasn’t produced much of a result downstream.

Without broad support for a competing measure, pledges like Ted Cruz’s to repeal Obamacare on his first day in office ring hollow.

Part of the party’s dereliction of duty was failing to realize decades ago that the employer-insurance model, supplemented by programs for the elderly, the indigent and uninsured children, was costly, inefficient and unstable. Proposals were floated by think tanks and some exceptionally courageous politicians for improvements focused on giving tax breaks and decision-making power over health care to people rather than reserving them to employers and politicians.

But no one did anything, and that left the field open for an end run from the left, which has always had the (substantially more costly and inefficient) federalization of health care as a major policy goal.

Leaving us where we are today. We’ve just had Obamacare’s six-year anniversary on March 23, and the news isn’t good, to no conservative’s surprise.

An Associated Press-GfK poll in February showed 58 percent of respondents disapproving of the way President Obama has handled health care, the highest such ranking since July 2014.

Why? On Nov. 14, 2015, The New York Times noted that Obama has “trumpeted the low premiums available on the law’s new marketplaces.”

“But for many consumers,” the paper continued, “the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.”

And the Kaiser Family Foundation reported Sept. 22 that, since 2010 in the private sector, “both the share of workers with deductibles and the size of those deductibles have increased sharply.

These two trends together result in a 67 percent increase in deductibles since 2010, much faster than the rise in single premiums (24 percent) and about seven times the rise in workers’ wages (10 percent) and general inflation (9 percent).”

Jeffrey H. Anderson, a senior fellow with the conservative Hudson Institute, wrote last Dec. 11 that “Obamacare’s exchange subsidies, which the Congressional Budget Office projected would cost $464 billion over 10 years when the legislation passed the House in March 2010, are now projected by the CBO to cost $849 billion over a decade.”

He added, “This increased expense isn’t arising from increased coverage.” Originally projected to cover 21 million people by 2016, the exchanges may only reach 12 million by the end of this year.

And the exchanges themselves are in trouble. In a March 28 Maine Heritage Policy Center analysis, the conservative public policy group noted that Maine’s “Community Health Options (CHO) has decided to increase prices for patients and customers next year– the latest sign that this Obamacare health co-op is teetering on the brink of a total collapse.”

As the report noted, “The state’s largest provider of individual health insurance, CHO has also stopped accepting new customers because of its poor financial situation after ending 2015 with a shocking $31 million deficit. It is predicted to lose another $43 million in 2016.”

It added, “CHO and the 22 other (state) health care co-ops have been nothing short of a disaster.

“They needed roughly $2.4 billion in federal loans just to get started – and none of those taxpayer dollars have ever been repaid.

“Most of the co-ops never even got off the ground, with all but two of them still losing money by 2014. That same year, 13 of these co-ops failed to hit their projected enrollments. Now, 12 of them have collapsed and disappeared forever.”

Meanwhile, as U.S. News reported March 25, the CBO said Medicaid costs “over the next decade are projected to be $146 billion higher than expected … in spite of the fact that 19 states refuse to participate in the program at this time.”

That’s because, the CBO said, “Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollees will total 68 million people in 2016 – or 16 million more people than anticipated six years ago, when the law passed.”

But we needn’t worry: Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, was recorded telling a recent campaign rally that, if elected, her mother could fix “the kind of the crushing costs that still exist for too many people who even are part of the Affordable Care Act.”

Which brings to mind this saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

M.D. Harmon, a retired journalist and military officer, is a free-lance writer and speaker. He can be contacted at:

mdharmoncol@yahoo.com