MEGAN MCARDLE: Best Health-Care Plan for Republicans? Wait.

For a policy columnist, “Don’t do that” is the easiest column to write. Most policy ideas are bad. If you simply blindly oppose everything that anyone ever puts forward, you’ll end up being right most of the time.

However, that’s not very useful for politicians. If they just sit around Congress playing tiddlywinks all day, voters will get cranky. Congress is supposed to do things. So, having spent a few days saying unkind things about the Republican health-care plan, it probably behooves me to state what I think they should do.

Well, boy, that’s a hard question. Here’s the thing: For all the unkind words I’ve said, I get the forces that have brought Republicans to this point. As I wrote Thursday, Democrats built a shoddy and unworkable structure out of the political equivalent of concrete: nearly impossible to repair or renovate, and darned expensive to demolish. The task is made even harder by the fact that Democrats currently control just enough votes in the Senate to keep Republicans from passing any sort of clean, comprehensive bill.

If you listen to the presentation that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan gave Thursday, you’ll see that he understands the problems. His argument is, basically: Democrats screwed up the health-care system. They won’t let us fix it cleanly, so if we’re going to do something, these half-measures are the best we can do. Let’s get this passed, address what we can through regulatory changes, then force Democrats to come to the table to negotiate the rest.

I basically agree with the first two sentences: Yes, Democrats expanded coverage, which is good, but in the process they made potentially fatal alterations to the market for individual insurance. These need to be addressed before many people, particularly in rural areas, simply find there are no policies for sale.

It’s the third sentence I have a problem with, because I don’t think that Democrats are going to come to the table, even after Republicans push this half-bill through.

Well, they can do it without the Democrats by squashing filibusters using the Reid Option.