Nighttime Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Why Republicans Can’t Replace ObamaCare

…for getting outplayed, again and again, on health care:

Conservatives are falling into the same trap… conceding… that the government should be trying to provide everybody with health insurance…. Once you accept those premises, all of your solutions look like the left’s solutions….

Cannon is right. The basic project of health reform, at least as it’s been understood in American politics in recent decades, involves the government giving money to poor people so they can buy health-care insurance. That money needs to come from somewhere…. The problem for conservatives is that making sure poor people have health insurance is politically popular…. Philip Klein illuminates an inconvenient truth: upheaval in the health-care system typically makes for terrible politics…. This is the central problem for conservative health reformers… the party doesn’t want to make the sacrifices necessary to unite behind an alternative to Obamacare, much less actually pass and implement it….

Klein identifies three schools of conservative thought on what to do next: the Reform School… the Replace School… repeal Obamacare and replace it with Obamacare-lite; and the Restart School, which… rejects the idea that the government should be… expand[ing] access to health care…. Klein’s book is… far and away the clearest, most detailed look at conservative health-policy thinking….

But… the important cleavage… is between those in the party who want to prioritize health reform and those who don’t…. And that’s really the problem for conservative health reformers. For all the plans floating around, there’s little evidence Republicans care enough about health reform to pay its cost.