http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/ideology-not-tactics-killed-trumpcare-w494720
"There was no plan in that seven years, and there would have been no reasonable plan out of the conference committee, because a Republican health care bill is an oxymoron. The problem was never one of tactics, but always one of ideology. Every bill Republicans put forth was measured in the millions of Americans who would lose their coverage. There was never a plan on the table that would have given Americans cheaper, better, simpler, more effective access to health care. It only subtracted, because subtraction is what the Republicans in Congress believe in. They don't believe access to health care is a basic human right. They don't believe people should never go bankrupt because they get sick. They hide behind words like "freedom" and "personal responsibility," but what's freedom worth if you get cancer while making $30,000 a year? How can anyone who isn't fabulously wealthy be expected to take personal responsibility for bills that could easily go into the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars? Republican faith in the free market to solve all our problems doomed any attempt at writing a health care law. The free market doesn't care if people get sick, go bankrupt and die if there's no profit in it. The Affordable Care Act was a last-chance effort to preserve a market-based health care system, based largely on ideas that originated in conservative think tanks. Its failures – and there are some – are largely failures of too little regulation, not too much. The plan Republicans have been fiercely opposing because it has a Democratic president's name attached to it is the closest thing they could ever get to a GOP health care plan. Americans don't want to be kicked off our health insurance. We don't want it to become unaffordable, or to fail to cover our actual health care needs. But any plan that comes solely from the Republican Party will do exactly that. We know this because we just saw them try over and over again, and every result was the same: Less coverage, higher costs."
