DAVID HARSANYI: The GOP Senate Health Care Bill Isn’t Great, But It’s Better Than Obamacare.

Republicans should ask themselves what the alternative looks like. Listen, I wish Mike Lee were writing a market-based Obamacare repeal bill and that we had a president who was interested in reforming welfare, but at some point conservatives are going to have to take a page from Democrats and occasionally embrace incrementalism. Idealism is empowering and necessary. Yet pragmatism can’t always be treated as a transgression. You’re going to see the bill change — provisions in the bill might need to be altered once we get a Congressional Budget Office score and the parliamentarian vets it — but you’re not going to see a market-based iteration of reform. It’s going to have to be achieved piecemeal.

If the House couldn’t cobble together a genuine repeal, there is little chance that senators who have to go home to statewide electorates would be in a position to do so. In fact, it’s surprisingly “conservative.” For one thing, voters like parts of Obamacare—forcing coverage of preexisting conditions, for instance—that make a full repeal impossible. For another, some senators simply won’t sign on to immediate Medicaid rollbacks.

The Obamacare debate was also an intramural affair, crafted to allay the concerns of moderate Democrats, not Republicans. What Democrats correctly understood was that they were engaged in a war of attrition. Even the Affordable Care Act (ACA), until very recently the most unpopular major reform in American history, is astoundingly difficult to repeal.

So it is what it is.

Most of the complaints I’m reading from Senate Republicans have so far been about the bill’s timing (Medicaid expansion rollback) and expense (keeping the ObamaCare exchanges afloat for a while longer). There have been far fewer worries expressed about the bill’s structure. That might give McConnell the wiggle room to pass what it is, with just a few changes.

Or, as Harsanyi suggests, the whole thing might be legislative kabuki and designed to fail.