It wouldn’t be hard for Republican repealers to write a law that got rid of Obamacare while somehow keeping those few million who’ve signed up on some form of similar insurance. “If you like your Obamacare you can keep your Obamacare.” Exchange policies could be converted to non-exchange policies in a special, no-new-enrollments program, for example. Over time, attrition would whittle this grandfathered class down to trivial size–a process with which you’d think Obamacare’s architects would be familiar.

I don’t know if Obamacare will survive or not. Even its cockiest defenders, now whistling past the graveyard of missed deadlines, concede** that (as one of them, Josh Marshall, puts it) if “the mix of young and old people, healthy and sick” is “significantly out of whack you’ll have problems.”*** Problems that include, in Greg Sargent’s words, the possibility that “insurers pull out, and the exchanges collapse.”