First things first, let’s be clear: McCain did not kill the House bill to repeal Obamacare. That bill actually failed days before McCain cast his famous thumbs-down vote on July 28 that Lewis references.

The House bill wasn’t popular in the Senate largely because of its deep cuts to the Medicaid program. In fact, nine Republican senators voted against the House repeal bill. The bill that McCain voted against was “skinny repeal,” a pared-back piece of legislation that was meant to be a vehicle to get the two chambers to conference.

Lewis somehow supposes that, if McCain had voted differently, the House repeal bill (the American Health Care Act, or the AHCA) would have become law. That just wasn’t in the cards: The AHCA was never moving out of the Senate.