Yep. The New York Times gets it.
President Trump and Republican lawmakers have never been able to explain how they would improve on the Affordable Care Act, which they’ve promised to quickly repeal and replace with something better. Now, it’s increasingly evident that they have no workable plan and might never come up with one.
Congress blew past a self-imposed Jan. 27 deadline to introduce legislation to end the health law. Mr. Trump told Fox News in an interview that ran Sunday that a replacement for the health law might not be ready until next year. Meanwhile, Republican senators like Lamar Alexander and Orrin Hatch have started talking about “repairing” the A.C.A., or Obamacare, rather than removing it root-and-branch. And while House Speaker Paul Ryan still insists that Congress will repeal and replace it this year, his wishful statements are clearly meant in large measure just to placate the burn-it-all-down wing of his caucus.
After campaigning for years against the health care law, Republicans seem to be realizing that it will be incredibly difficult to deliver on Mr. Trump’s promise of providing a program that is better, cheaper and covers more people.
All of this has always been true. For six years, the House maniacs have insisted that they will accept nothing but total destruction of the law. The non-maniac Republicans were content doing small destructive things to it, knowing they would be safe from actually having to come up with an actual replacement plan because they weren’t going to regain the White House. Well, guess what?
But now they all have a big problem: one of those maniacs is probably going to be confirmed as Trump’s HHS secretary this week. That maniac, Rep. Tom Price, is going to be in a position to do drastic harm to the law, whether Congress actually repeals it or not. And then they’ll all be in a real pickle: a crumbling ACA and no plan at all for picking up the pieces for the 30 or more million people whose insurance they took away.