The question of political “ownership” over the health care system was the hot topic of Capitol Hill on Wednesday, as both President Obama and Vice President–elect Mike Pence visited members of their respective parties to game out the Obamacare repeal fight. There were a couple reasons this dominated the day’s conversation. The first is that Donald Trump tweeted about it early in the morning, so because of intractable systemic flaws in American media, politics, and culture, everyone “had” to jabber about it all day. But unlike his diatribes against random cable television hosts, magazine editors, and union reps, he hit on something important with this morning communiqué.
“Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases…… ,” he tweeted. Which party is more exposed to the fallout from repeal is an important question with the potential to dictate the fortunes of the Trump administration and the unified Republican federal government.
The answer may hinge on precisely how unified that Republican government is in writing, passing, and implementing a replacement. If GOPers want to escape the post-repeal mess they’ve committed themselves to politically, they’re going to need to show a level of unity that congressional Republicans haven’t been known for in recent years. It would be a disaster, and their disaster, if they made it to repeal but never to replace.
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