… While it’s certainly true that both the president and the speaker made mistakes in handling the health care issue, it’s inaccurate to portray the demise of the AHCA as primarily a consequence of individual failures of leadership or strategy. …
The real obstacle to the passage of health care reform is the Republican Party itself, and any full reckoning with what just happened has to grapple with that fact. Seven years of attacks on the ACA as a “government takeover” of health care, along with repeated promises to replace Obamacare with an unspecified superior alternative, paid considerable electoral dividends but left the party committed to an unachievable policy goal. …
Mainstream Republicans, Trump included, have viewed the entire health care policy domain most of all as a useful club with which to beat Democrats, while hard-line conservatives have likewise viewed it as a useful club with which to beat mainstream Republicans. CONT.
David A. Hopkins, Boston College