JUDD GREGG: How the GOP can win on healthcare.

I’m not sure how solid Gregg’s plan is, but he’s correctly diagnosed the root of the problem:

The purpose of ObamaCare was to gather all these [groups of uninsured] people into some type of healthcare coverage and have that coverage be highly subsidized by the rest of the population.

This was to be accomplished either directly, through subsidies that depended on taxes; or indirectly, through increasing the premiums of those who had insurance.

The outcome would be that most of these 40 to 45 million would have new benefits that they themselves paid little for.

This effort was to be undertaken by creating exchanges, which were actuarially unsound; and by expanding by fifty percent the Medicaid enrollment, which was grossly underfunded.

The creators of ObamaCare knew of the structural failures of the proposed approach. It was their expectation that the financial stress on the insurance industry and the huge tax subsidies needed to pay for the migration from private insurance into exchanges would lead to some sort of reordering of the system.

They knew that states, and especially doctors, could not handle the underfunded addition of millions of patients.

They also understood political reality, in which it is extremely difficult to take back a subsidized benefit once it has been given. This is especially true when it involves millions of people.

Thus, as ObamaCare crumbled, a single-payer system would be the default position to which the country would turn.

ObamaCare is crumbling, all right. What remains to be seen is if the GOP has the courage of its oft-stated convictions.