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You may have heard people muttering lately about a Republican effort to revive Obamacare repeal. Sarah Kliff has all the details here, but I don’t plan to say much about it for now. There are several reasons:
- The CBO has basically told us already that the old version of Trumpcare was as bad as just repealing Obamacare and not replacing it with anything. The ultras in the House want to make Trumpcare even worse, but it’s a little hard to see how they can do that. Can they really make things worse than they were before Obamacare was passed? I wouldn’t put anything past them, I guess, but it seems a little pointless to follow the twists and turns of bad vs. really bad vs. catastrophically bad.
- Trump still has to face the same political dynamic as he did before: if he makes Trumpcare even worse, he might get the ultras back on his side but he’ll lose more of the moderates. It remains unclear if there’s a sweet spot to be found.
- Finally, keep in mind that the House was supposed to be the easy part. For a long time, we all just assumed Paul Ryan would manage to pass something, but then the real battle would be in the Senate. That’s still the case. And if it’s hard to figure out where the sweet spot in the House would be, it’s all but impossible to figure out where it would be in the Senate.
That said, Republicans do have one thing going for them: the defeat of Trumpcare was a political debacle that might have woken them up. One way or another, if health care gets back on the agenda they might be extra motivated to make sure that something passes. Going down in flames twice in a few months would be pretty devastating.
