One of the most telling criticisms of Marco Rubio has centered on his lack of experience. That line of attack on Rubio was helped by his poor Senate attendance record since he started running for the president, and his open disgust with Congress that led him to choose not to run for re-election and instead try for the presidency. That rankled the freshman senator and his initial response to these brickbats was to claim that, as a former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, his record should not be compared to Barack Obama’s even thinner resume when he first ran for president in 2008. But eventually, he dropped that rather lame rejoinder and settled on arguing that the problem with Obama was his bad ideas not his experience prior to entering the White House. That’s a more sensible argument for him but, as the New York Times reports today in a remarkable front-page story, Rubio’s record of legislative achievement turns out to have been even greater than his supporters were claiming.

While Republicans have spent the last five years railing at ObamaCare and trying vainly to repeal it, Rubio appears to be the only member of the GOP that has actually done anything to undermine the president’s signature health care legislation. As the Times reports:

A little-noticed health care provision that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.

So for all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican presidential hopeful has actually done something toward achieving that goal.

Mr. Rubio’s efforts against the so-called risk corridor provision of the health law have hardly risen to the forefront of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but his plan limiting how much the government can spend to protect insurance companies against financial losses has shown the effectiveness of quiet legislative sabotage.

While the Times describe Rubio’s efforts as “sabotage,” it appears that he seems to have a better understanding of the fatal flaw at the heart of ObamaCare. Instead of a plan that will make health care more “affordable,” the law that Democrats passed in 2010 without, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously put it, “knowing what was in it,” is a giant boondoggle. Prior to Rubio’s 2014 legislation going into effect, ObamaCare had a so-called “risk corridor” that was intended help insurance companies if they had too many new sick people as customers and not enough cash from their premiums to actually pay their medical bills. By limiting those payments, some insurers have had to close up shop inconveniencing consumers. Hence, the Times characterization of the provision as “sabotage.” But what that amounted to was, as Rubio aptly put it, “a taxpayer-funded bailout for insurance companies.”

As the Times story relates, major as well as small insurance companies weren’t happy with Rubio because, without his bill, they could count on an unlimited supply of federal cash to subsidize their operations. Indeed, they say 12 of the 23 nonprofit insurance co-ops that were created by ObamaCare have failed, “disrupting coverage for more than 700,000 people.”

That sounds like a terrible thing and, no doubt, those who have lost coverage are unhappy about what happened. But the flaw wasn’t Rubio’s attempt to limit the damage that ObamaCare was doing to the federal budget and the marketplace. The problem was the idea of a new federally-subsidized health care system that pretended to function as part of a free market but was actually a vast new federal entitlement with no checks, balances, or a limit on how much cash would pour from the treasury into the flimsy companies set up to service those forced to rely on ObamaCare for coverage.

Among the many elements of ObamaCare that no one in Congress understood before they passed it was a new system that more or less guaranteed new insurance companies a pathway to federal cash. Most Americans, including many of those liberal Democrats that voted for ObamaCare, were resolved never again to bail out failing banks. But what the president’s plan did was to set up a scheme whereby failing insurance companies never had to worry about the consequences of setting up a business without the money to back up their promises. Like so much else that passes for social justice or environmental plans advanced by the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act was a refined form of crony capitalism that let some profit at the expense of the taxpayers no matter what they did.

Obama made the problem even worse in 2013 when, in response to criticisms about customers not being able to keep the coverage they liked as he had promised, he diverted money from the risk corridor fund to let insurers renew canceled policies that did not meet ObamaCare requirements. That set the stage for Rubio’s legislation, which cut off further such depredations on the treasury.

Now the administration is seeking to find new ways around Rubio’s regulation and, as the senator points out, Marilyn Tavenner, the same official that helped rolled out HealthCare.gov is now leading the charge for an insurance company lobbying group to get their hands on more taxpayer money to keep them afloat. That salient fact only lends more credence to the crony capitalism charge. Republicans should be following Rubio’s lead in opposing those efforts. If they do, they may soon realize that the Florida senator has found a key flaw in the law that could lead to its ultimate demise.

While one bill doesn’t make a senator a legislative genius, it’s clear Rubio deserves more credit for his Senate record than he has gotten to date. Certainly Obama achieved nothing like this success in his four years in the Senate. Neither has Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, the other two freshmen running for the White House. Unless, that is, you consider Cruz’s achievement in becoming the most hated man on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill a success.

In a year when many Republican voters seem to care more about whether candidates are sufficiently truculent than about their governing skills or knowledge of policy, Rubio’s success taking down the most important symbol of the Obama administration may not count for much. But after years of complaining that Washington Republicans were not fighting hard enough and being consistently beaten by the president, we now have an example of just the opposite. Marco Rubio has actually beaten Obama on this issue. That’s something that few other Republicans can claim this year.