You’re right. the purist don’t see to realize that they have to get people to vote for their ideas or it won’t be law regardless. I doubt they could can Collins to vote for their repeal let alone a Democrat. The confusion for me though is this. You only need 60 votes for break a filibuster not to pass the law. So, Republicans can always kill the filibuster. They won’t obviously and especially not for this but they could use Rule 19 to run out the clock on the opposition and force a vote (Rush was talking about this for Supreme Court nomination and I don’t see why they couldn’t use that for anything).
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
You’d need 51 votes to eliminate the filibuster, and you don’t have that. The filibuster is also a convenient excuse for RINOs to rhetorically oppose Obamacare without having to cast a vote to repeal it.
Maybe there’s some technical, creative way of reaching cloture, but a) they’re not going to do it because it will leave all the RINOs exposed and b) Democrats didn’t even go to that extreme in 2008 (maybe they would now). The House ended up passing the Senate bill since Scott Brown’s election as the 41st Republican left them no other option.