Health care legislating ain’t pretty. In many cases, it’s downright coyote ugly. Particularly in the absence of a coherent and consistent majority in favor of substantially revising the status quo. Hence, today’s Senate Republican leadership “discussion draft” bill.
To be fair, leaders can’t go where they don’t have enough followers. So a good bit of today’s exaggerated reactions on the Right involves failure to come to terms with the divergence between past feel-better rhetoric and today’s grimmer political realities. There are neither enough votes nor popular support to repeal Obamacare simplistically, or engineer a softer landing toward substantial reform of the ACA — let alone offer a long-term path toward market-based health policy in practice. A long parade of mistakes in politics and policy were made AFTER March 2010 that helped deliver us to today’s limited set of legislative options.
. . .
