Others on the right envisioned a dramatically deregulated ObamaCare that eventually would have swallowed up Medicare and Medicaid. Yet the House GOP plan mostly keeps the "essential health benefits" regulations of ObamaCare that dictate what benefit plans purchased on the exchanges must offer.

Nearly seven years after President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, House Republicans have failed in their big attempt to offer FreeMarketCare. And this may well have been their final chance to do so. Health care isn't the only item on the GOP agenda, after all. Congressional Republicans are also desperate to cut business taxes, while the Trump White House keeps promising a major infrastructure plan. And don't forget Ivanka Trump's pricey paid leave and child care ideas.

Meanwhile, the ACA remains desperately in need of reform as too few of the young and healthy sign up. "ObamaCare is so poorly constructed it is literally an anti-selection machine," health-care analyst Bob Laszewski writes at his popular blog, adding,"The Republican proposal is worse."

Well, Sanders had an answer for that -- he called his version "Medicare for All" -- and it's an answer that many Democrats wanted all along. Indeed, one way Obama sold Democrats on health reform that kept for-profit, private insurance central was by suggesting it was merely a way station to single payer. That idea is probably looking better and better to Democrats right about now, especially as the party continues to drift left. And maybe to the Republican president, too.