Consider that Obama's task was far harder than the one the Republicans just failed. In addition to the House, where his 2009 bills passed, he had to get every single Democrat in the Senate. In contrast, the Republicans could lose 21 Republicans in the House.
Not to mention, creating a healthcare plan is harder than either altering it or voting it down.
What is surprising is that Mulvaney does not seem to get that work needs to be done up front to insure that they have the votes. Trump's comment blaming Democrats is even more bizzare when it is know that they moved the bill to the right to try to get all the tea party - losing some Republican moderates in the process. We all know the two parties are polarized on this. There were no Democrats in favor of the first version the goal of which they were 100% against, why would he think that having made it far worse, they would vote for it.
What is clear is that Price/Mulvaney/Trump et al are not master LBJ level negotiators, they can't see things that EVERYONE here could have told them. I suspect that their problem is that a REAL fix bill would have to come out of working with the Governors and fixing problems that were not forseen in 2009. Imagine a bill that both expanded Medicaid in all states and added a public option - insuring that no one has no plan to select and insuring choice, whereever the open market offered it. One great possibility for the public option is to allow people to buy into Medicad or Medicare - the latter being better because it is perceived as good.
Making that an option, I bet some Republicans would be open to adding back the funding Rubio and the Republicans added for the risk corridors. (With an available public option, they would favor that to avoid the drift to single payer.) Not to mention, I assume it would stop the game playing where Aetna quit in anger due to a merger with Humana not being approved. Throw in a change on how much drug companies could charge - maybe linking the maximum cost to what the company charges in another country.
That bill could likely get enough votes in both Houses, if there were no political parties. I think most if not all Democrats could agree to something like this if it was done right. The question is could enough Republicans agree if trump pushed something like this? The motivation for the policyless Trump is that he could call it a win. Given that, I could see Trump swinging .. but not enough Republican legislators to pass it in either House as a bipartisan bill.
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