So many things. Let’s start with this.

This is a training week at work. As such, one’s eyes wander, and mine today noticed the following sign on a co-worker’s cubicle:

“DOCUMENT LIKE COMEY.”

Heh.

I keep seeing articles on the Interwebs like this one at Vox saying, essentially, oh no, Mr. Bill, the Republicans are finally going to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Look out.

Here’s the thing, kids. They already have.

See, President Obama understood a fundamental thing about health care reform in these Untied States. He understood fundamentally that legislation alone was not enough to affect reform. He understood that the legislation would only be effective as the policy it manifested. “Obamacare” understood, for example, that you can’t demand that insurance companies stop screwing with people with “pre-existing” conditions unless the policy worked to make the pool larger, and that the only way to do that was to bring younger, healthier folks to the table. Thus the mandate. Plus, you had to offer the insurance companies a bridge to walk until transition happened from this pool to that pool. Thus, the vital corridor payments, which were meant to provide certainty to these corporate persons, to pay out to those who took too many cuts because they can no longer screw people whose only crime was to have a cancer or a sneeze before trying to become insured.

Marco Rubio killed the risk corridor payment.

Plus you had states out-and-out refuse the Medicare expansion and participation in the exchanges, which was stupid and drove free money out of those states, and lack of participation in the exchanges led to a heavier load on the federal Web site for registering people, which led it to fail, but did you see President Obama tweet about the “losers” who were slapping the ACA’s ass to pinkish? No. You did not.

So the risk corridor payments ended. And then you saw companies leave the exchanges and raise rates. And then the Republicans began claiming that the ACA was “imploding.”

The Affordable Care Act would have been an excellent reform had it been allowed to work. It addressed not only the law but the policy that followed. That is what made it so smart. That is what made its potential to work so powerful.

It was good policy. Therefore, Republicans hate it.

You can’t just make a law that says that you get to keep your kid on the health care dole until they are 26. You don’t get to dismantle the whole infrastructure of “Obamacare” and keep the things people like. You don’t get to do those things unless your legislation is backed up by policy. Anything the Republigoats pass here won’t do that. The ACA did that.

That is why the Senate Republigoats won’t let it see the light of day.

Because all they have is a “repeal.”

They don’t have a “replace.”

They never will.

Wrist-watch. Crisco.