Are you willing to go nuclear?

This is the question we should all be asking ourselves, folks.

I'm personally not the biggest fan of the bill but I realize why it is the way it is. I assumed that Ryan would have come out the gate swinging with a hardline conservative plan that mirrored almost exactly the Price plans of yesteryear. Such a strategy would be assaulted on multiple fronts, but would moderate closer to something akin to what we see now. He took a different approach.

The single biggest bottleneck right now is the filibuster. It disallows the conservatives in the House from being able to do everything they want. This is the reason that, even though substantially every other tax (including capital gains and other bullshite) is being wiped away, they are only delaying the Cadillac Tax. The premise in that they can't pass a law that adds to the deficit in 10 years via Budget Reconciliation, which is the only method at their disposal right now to get anything done with just 51 votes.

There are other components that can't simply be wiped away with reconciliation, such as pre-existing conditions, but in general, this is why you see what you are seeing. Meanwhile, you have the likes of Cory Garner, alleged conservatives in the Senate, who ran on repealing and replacing Obamacare, saying they don't want to impact Medicaid.

Guys like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz make their living off of grandstanding in meaningless parliamentary bullshite in Congress, or in Fox News interviews. The stuff they say isn't based on anything resembling reality, but the base loves it.

The ultimate truth is that the biggest impediment to doing a true repeal and replace in one fell swoop in 2017 would be to remove the rules surrounding the filibuster.

The question is, do you want to go nuclear?