WE ALL KNEW WHERE THIS WAS HEADED:

Republicans could have spent their time in the Obama era wilderness doing the hard work of building consensus around an alternative vision for healthcare when the stakes were low. Instead, they squandered this opportunity by focusing their efforts on scoring daily messaging victories. In the short-term, the strategy seemed to pay off politically, as Republicans regained unified control of government. But when it comes to achieving longer-term policy victories, the strategy has proven a dismal failure.

When Republicans took over in 2017, they had to start largely from scratch to gain support for plans to repeal and replace Obamacare. Though healthcare is among the most complicated domestic issues, Republicans wanted to race through the issue as quickly as possible so they could get on with tax cuts. Despite seven years of promises to repeal Obamacare, they came up largely empty handed. (Repealing the individual mandate penalties is not the same as advancing a broad free market healthcare vision.)

Republicans seem to have resigned themselves to moving on. From a purely technical standpoint, it remains highly unlikely that Republicans will even pass a budget this year, let alone one that would include the reconciliation instructions that would be necessary to pass any sort of healthcare bill with a simple majority in the Senate. Of course, even if they had the procedural tool to pass a bill with a simple majority, they are no closer to getting 50 Republicans to agree on a plan than they were last fall. And if they don't address the issue this year, they aren't going to be able to in 2019, when even under the best case scenario they'd have a much narrower majority in the House.

It would be bad enough if Republican stumbles merely preserved an Obamacare status quo with rising premiums and dwindling choices. But by failing to deliver on an alternative, Republicans are providing the space that Democrats need to plot their next big expansion. And liberals have been using that space to develop competing plans all with the goal of completing the job that Obamacare started.

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