Republicans still don’t have an airtight strategy for repealing/replacing/vanishing the Democrats’ health care bill, and if they fail to conjure one over the next few months (years?), I suspect it’ll be in part because they focused more on polls and messaging than on actual policy. For instance, I’m looking at Ramesh Ponnuru’s piece at National Review about how Republicans can win in November on an anti-health care platform, and am slightly shocked that conservatives still think they can repeal the bill and worry about actual reforms later:
Many important questions about how to repeal Obamacare, and exactly what reforms to replace it with, remain unresolved. But that’s fine. Those questions do not have to be resolved right now, when conservatives and Republicans have no power to set the agenda in Washington, D.C. For eventual repeal to be possible, what needed to happen soon after Obamacare’s enactment was for Republicans to commit themselves to the goal. To a large extent, that has happened. Republicans who are running for office this year, in particular, are advertising their desire for repeal.
Health care passed for a multitude of reasons, and I’d like to think that this paradigm was one of them: Everyone agreed that the system needed reforming, Democrats had a plan, while Republicans had objections to the Democrat’s plan, and then a supposed plan that the GOP waited to unveil and promote until the Democrats had unstoppable momentum.