So, is this the end? No. Sure, Trump has little interest in revisiting this particular tar baby any time soon. Even though he HAS talked about negotiating with Democrats in the future, that doesn’t matter. The president can’t introduce legislation and Ryan wouldn’t schedule a vote on anything that Democrats would agree on. And Ryan DOES care about this. But I don’t think that his main concern is the individual markets that have gotten much of the attention. He desperately wants to gut Medicade, preferably by turning it into some sort of block grant so that the states will have to take the blame for the actual cuts. This was his chance to do that while waving around “market based solutions,” to the individual market like the magicians other hand. He’ll be back with another plan to block grant Medicade, probably next year.
Trump is weakened by this, because it destroys the sense of inevitability that does so much to secure votes. “It’s going to pass with or without your vote,” is great to get recalcitrant legislators to stop trying to keep negotiating for a better deal. But the inevitability of this particular legislation was suspect from the beginning because just about everybody realized that this particular iteration had no chance in the Senate.
