Yesterday, Ohio governor John Kasich briefly made news when the Associated Press quoted him saying that repeal of Obamacare was simply “not gonna happen,” and adding that “the opposition to it was really either political or ideological,” and in either case insufficiently attuned to the “real improvements in people’s lives.” Liberals pounced, conservatives groaned, and Kasich quickly went into damage control mode, explaining that he was only talking about the Medicaid expansion, which he had already explicitly supported and implemented, and not the rest of the law, which he still officially wants to (say it with me) repealandreplace.
That last is the official position, of course, of the entire Republican Party, which currently enjoys, per my colleagues at The Upshot, a 66 percent chance of seizing a Senate majority in two weeks time. But the controversy around Kasich’s comments are a useful reminder that not only is there no Republican consensus on how to actually replace the health care law, but almost no G.O.P. Senate candidates are actually campaigning on a politically credible replacement plan — with “politically credible” defined, for reasons I’ve elaborated on before, as “not rolling coverage levels back toward the pre-Obamacare status quo.” The one major exception is Ed Gillespie, running against Mark Warner in Virginia, whose plan Ramesh Ponnuru has commented on and defended here and here.
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