The dog caught the car and does not know what to do with it except continue to denounce it as a failure that it will replace with something great.

The entire Affordable Care Act history is one of laughable GOP intransigence to an idea that came out of one of their think tanks (Heritage), was implemented in part by one of their governors (Romney) and is flawed only because Obama and the Democrats bent over backwards to make the entire complex ball of wax more acceptable to market loving ideologues (they hate it with a white hot irrational passion anyway).

Trump, as he does, mimics Obama who said that the GOP needs to own their repeal efforts. Trump says the Dems need to “own” Obamacare.  Imaginative as usual.  But it’s the GOP who needs to own all of it.  It exists as it is today, in all its complexity, entirely because of them.

Republicans have no actual plans proposed or even sketchy ephemeral ideas on a napkin that would perpetuate healthcare policies for 20,000,000 people, never mind increase that number or improve health care for anybody.  Paul Ryan is the big thinker in the GOP and he spends all his time coming up with Rube Goldberg budget machines that lower taxes and yet increase revenue like medieval alchemists selling the idea they could turn brass to gold.  His budget quackery is the epitome of big thinking over there with the people addicted to simple, unworkable idea.  They couldn’t even begin to put together anything even remotely as complicated as a healthcare bill that’s passable (even among themselves) that would do anybody any good at all.

The great irony is that the simplest idea that everybody, even they can understand, is a single payer system that their voters would actually like.  But they demanded a market-based solution, nothing like the incredibly popular Medicare.  And they got it.  Then spent every moment since then doing everything they could to undermine it, at the cost of their own constituents healthcare.  Now they promise to kill it and their constituents (people in red states are more likely to be on ACA, also more likely to be suffering without the Medicaid expansion).

It will be fascinating to see what the dog does now when faced with victory.  Except that the mythical dog doesn’t suddenly have people’s lives in its mouth.