EDITORIAL: Collapse and replace

OPINION:

Congressional Republicans have tried to turn the page on the Obamacare debacle, but the next page has another dismal message. Instead of repeal and replace, Americans face collapse and replace of Barack Obama’s health care system. The only uncertainty is how soon and how bad it will be. While the humbled party leaders snipe at each other over what could have been, the nation’s health-care system continues to wither at the edges, and sometime soon someone had better be ready with something better.

It was a subdued President Trump who announced Friday that without the requisite votes, the Republican American Health Care Act had been pulled from a pending House vote. “We were just probably anywhere from 10 to 15 votes short,” Mr. Trump said. “With no Democrat support we couldn’t quite get there.” Nice words, but close is good only in horseshoes, as the wise man says.

Mr. Trump reminded everyone that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer own Obamacare, and they will own the bits and pieces when it implodes. When the federal subsidies are exhausted, the Democrats will argue that they haven’t overspent, it’s just that everyone is undertaxed. The president’s suggestion that he is “totally open” to working with Democrats on a second try to fix Obamacare is nice, but naive. Obamacare required 2,000 pages of lawyerly explanation that didn’t explain anything, and explanations of its deficiencies will be boiled down to a few words: “We need more money.”

Mr. Trump should now be mending fences with House Freedom Caucus conservatives who balked at what they scorned as “Obamacare-lite.” The president tweeted, “Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!”

And save it they did, for a while. If the president is to find the votes to enact his agenda, it won’t be with help of the Democrats, who are celebrating the humiliation of both the president and his party in Congress, and are busily plotting the defeat of Neil Gorsuch now. There are no conservatives in the Democratic caucus, and they’re looking forward to watching another Republican debacle over cutting taxes as well as the defeat of Judge Gorsuch.

Republicans must put away their long knives. Everyone deserves a second chance (and sometimes a third). Speaker Paul Ryan deserves some of the blame for what happened to repeal and replace, but it’s nave to assume that the Republican dominance of Congress and an ally at the White House translates easily into effective lawmaking. A measured, steady construction of consensus is what works.

Whether the Congressional Budget Office was right or wrong with its estimate that “repeal and replace” would throw 24 million American off their health insurance, what is clear is that the American Health Care Act must get a free-market overhaul.

Eliminating the Obamacare essential-benefits packages, which require consumers to pay for services they don’t need, and the community rating schemes that force healthy people to pay the same high rates as their ailing counterparts, could expand the legislative sweet spot where a House majority lives.

Costs are set to rise by an average of 25 percent this year but that will still not be enough to keep insurers in the black, so the collapse of Obamacare draws nearer by the month. Americans deserve and demand a better system, not just a different system. Republicans must persevere in their do-over. “Instead of doing the blame game,” says Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, “let’s get to work,” There’s plenty of work for everybody.