There are a few parts of Obamacare that are enormously popular with the public-- for example, the provision that says that if you change jobs, your new insurer can't refuse to cover your preexisting conditions. A pure repeal would leave a lot of people without coverage, and would be politically suicidal.
This Ryan rag of a bill had a 17% approval at worst, and 27% approval at best according to “polls”.
How bad can it be to pull a dead thing out of the plumbing?
Under Obamacare, millions of people are without coverage. They have been forced to buy "insurance" that costs 2 to 3 times what insurance cost before, with massively high deductibles, that no doctors or hospitals will actually accept.
1. Repeal Obamacare, every single word.
2. Allow anyone that wants to buy into Medicaid, regardless of pre-existing conditions. If necessary, subsidize their premiums so that they are the same massively high premiums that everyone is now forced to pay under Obamacare, with the same ridiculously high deductibles.
3. Force all Senators and Congresscritters into Medicaid.
Problem solved.
-PJ
The prohibition on existing condition exclusions in work-based health insurance is a key ERISA provision that predates Obamacare by decades, but even it required employers to provide everyone insurance (so no cherry-picking) and also required the new employee to have had prior “credible” coverage.
The Obamacare prohibition on existing condition exclusion has NO requirement of prior credible coverage AND applied to the individual (i.e., “exchange”) markets, where sick or injured people can cherry-pick to their hearts content. The disastrous actuarial impacts are EVER SO SLIGHTLY mitigated by the individual and employer mandates ... so of course the House GOP takes away the mandates while leaving the prohibition on exclusion.