It has everything to do with the reality of governing. Backbenchers can pretend to rip up the ACA without facing the consequences. Those tasked with governing have to contend with the millions who have been helped by it, and the constituency created by a runaway entitlement program.
You would think rational people could recognize that entitlement programs are unsustainable and will eventually result in our collapse, and therefore bite the bullet and do the hard thing which they pretended to do when they knew they would suffer no consequences for it.
So what? Would you rather have single payer and the evil insurance companies out of it completely? What's wrong with insurance companies - they provide a service many of us need and earn a profit. You call yourself a conservative?
I know you can't read everything I write, (more's the pity) so you can't know that I oppose insurance, and especially medical insurance on a philosophical basis. I want insurance out of health care period. I perceive "insurance" (health insurance is not really insurance) as a major cause of much of the problems with health care costs and the health industry in general.
To overly simplify my point, "insurance" has created artificial market conditions (people other than the recipients paying the bills) that have greatly inflated the costs of health care.
Now you may say it is unrealistic to go there from what we have now, but I say that nevertheless it should be our goal to separate health care from "insurance", and we shouldn't be doing anything which reinforces the connection between the two.
That horse is out of the barn.
Do you know what is the proper solution to having the horse out of the barn? Putting the horse back in the barn! Burning down the barn because the horse left is just dumb.
The time for spitting on the working poor was before the ACA was enacted. Now the ACA has a constituency - unwinding it requires some compromises, and, hopefully, incremental progress toward conservative policy goals.
Yes it now has an entitlement constituency, but if we don't engage in this entitlement fight now, over this, then when? and over what?
Wreck the constituency by removing the subsidies, as Trump has done. Make a bigger constituency against it, as Trump is trying to do by removing the subsidies.
Thanks to you and yours for saving ObamaCare!
It is the squishes that saved Obamacare by mitigating it's damage by granting exceptions and spreading it out over a longer period of time. Strategic thinkers would have demanded it be implemented immediately with no exceptions and with all the horrible crushing costs that it will eventually implement.
General Grant understood this over a century ago.
" I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution."Can you deal with reality, sir?
Can you? The numbers don't work, and will never work. We have to acknowledge the reality of the "cold equations."