Socialists often follow a pattern. They’re all about the product and level of quality provided by a socialist system when they talk about it to everyone else, but you’ll notice that socialists are very often the first to abandon all the wonderful benefits of socialist programs for something better, and the list of things that are better outside of socialist systems is very, very long.

Some, however, get stuck with it and aren’t the least bit happy about it for financial reasons and so end up not enrolling at all.

New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is likely one such socialist. Very often, AOC loves to talk about socialist healthcare programs but before AOC was a congresswoman she was covered under Obamacare and apparently hated every second of it.

In an excellent article by Christopher Jacobs over at The Federalist, Jacobs details that AOC disapproved of the healthcare she suggests everyone else gets and she hated it for the same reason everyone else did; it was too expensive.

We can deduce that from a tweet AOC sent on Thursday where she confesses to never having any good healthcare for most of her adult life.

“The thing that these conservative Senators don’t seem to understand is that I’ve actually had a physically difficult working-class job without good healthcare most of my adult life,” tweeted AOC.

The thing that these conservative Senators don’t seem to understand is that I’ve actually had a physically difficult working-class job without good healthcare most of my adult life.

I bring that work ethic to Congress & to my community. They sit around on leather chairs all day.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 3, 2020

“Ocasio-Cortez graduated from Boston University in 2011—after Obamacare’s enactment, but before the law’s exchanges and major regulations took effect in January 2014,” wrote Jacobs. “Her tweet therefore claims she could not afford coverage for most of the time between the spring of 2011, when she moved back to the Bronx, and her inauguration to Congress in January 2019.”

Jacobs notes that AOC would likely have not had private insurance at all since only 1.6 percent of New Yorkers used insurance from private companies and enrollment in New York state’s individual health market was at 31,000. Thus, AOC likely didn’t participate in the socialist healthcare option that she loves so much.

But who could blame her? As Jacobs writes, it was too expensive for a young healthy woman like AOC who would have been paying as much as an older sick person:

But why did so few New Yorkers purchase health insurance on their own? In short, because lawmakers had made insurance unaffordable. As the Manhattan Institute paper notes, in the 1990s the state legislature passed a series of insurance “reforms” that gutted the state’s market for coverage. The laws forced insurers to accept all applicants regardless of health status (guaranteed issue), and charge all applicants the exact same rate (community rating), while also requiring all plans to offer generous benefits.

In other words, New York required insurers to charge a healthy 20-something individual like Ocasio-Cortez the exact same premiums as a 60-something smoker with emphysema. That policy has a nice name to it: Socialism.

What did this socialism do? Enrollment in insurance markets plummeted, and premiums soared. The New York state insurance market ended up in what actuaries call a “death spiral,” in which healthy people found the premium increases too high to justify enrolling, leaving a market consisting largely of people with acute health needs desperate for coverage.

“At its core, Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet therefore not just attacks Obamacare, but the redistributive and socialistic principles underpinning it. All of this makes her support for a single-payer system of socialized medicine that much more confounding,” writes Jacobs.

And that’s the underpinning point. A socialist didn’t want to take part in a socialist program because the program was so flawed due to the system it was based upon. The healthcare program couldn’t support itself under its own weight and as such forced many to go without the healthcare it was supposedly supposed to provide on the cheap.

Socialism: Not even once.