From
The Washington Post comes the latest
evidence that the GOP is the party with an Obamacare problem:
[...] senior House Republicans have decided to postpone a floor vote on their own health-reform proposal — making it less likely that a GOP alternative will be on offer before the November elections, according to lawmakers familiar with the deliberations. The delay will give them more time to work on the bill and weigh the consequences of putting a detailed policy before the voters in the fall, lawmakers said.
I'll go out on a limb and wager that there's roughly a zero percent chance that Republicans will actually put a detailed health care policy up for a vote before the election. Maybe another repeal vote dressed up as a replacement, but nothing that's a serious proposal, because the Republicans that are closest to the issue don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole:
[...] several chairmen of House committees told GOP leaders at a meeting last week that they would prefer to wait until next year to vote on a comprehensive health-care alternative, according to Republicans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
As
The Post notes, Republican candidates are no longer talking about Obamacare repeal as the focus of their message: Instead, they're talking about "fixing" the law—and trying to align themselves with its more popular provisions, sometimes to hilarious effect, as was the case with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who is trying to convince Kentucky that it can keep all the benefits of Obamacare while repealing the law.
Bottom-line: When Obamacare was an abstraction, Republicans loved to scream about it 24x7. But now that more than 8 million people have secured private insurance through Obamacare and millions more are getting coverage through its expansion of Medicaid, reality is beginning to settle in, and Republicans are running for the hills.