>>You won't have to twist my arm to acknowledge that the health care system in the U.S. needed some serious re-work. And I've said all along that there's one thing in the AHCA that I generally agree with - coverage of pre-existing conditions.

OK, but without getting personal - that's because that policy is advantageous for you. An intemperate young healthy person might scoff at that idea and call people parasites for wanting to insure their known leaky roof.

>> The ills of the system could have been dealt with through targeted legislation and I'm sure there could have been scenarios where the majority of licensed physicians would have agreed. However, right now, every survey of physicians shows the majority don't agree with AHCA. It is inconceivable that anyone can hold AHCA as a standard of value when the majority of physicians have strong opinions against it.

Not intended as a slight- but the US largely is its own medical ecosystem and the majority of US physicians know no different. You don't know what you don't know, and physicians all over the world have learned to be leery of any change, because it's always characterized by geniuses who believe (for example) that they have come up with the notion that prevention is better than cure, and the reason why glowing policies already are not in place to prevent illness, is because it was waiting for the genius to appear and save the world.

>>I'll put my purely pragmatic hat on and toss my libertarian views aside for a moment - one might make an argument that the AHCA "might" have been received better, were the U.S. economy not going through a five year period of recession/extremely slow recovery. With a poor labor participation rate and with other weak indicators, it was the WORST time for something like AHCA. There were politicians who honestly thought Americans would be gullible enough to believe that AHCA would be an economic stimulus. It's safe to say that anyone who still believes that today is dumber than a bag of hammers.

IMHO the US healthcare system had at most a decade before catastrophe under previous strategies. You still face an unfunded Medicare of >$47T. How did it happen? Well, for example- in 2003 a huge unfunded voter bribe for prescription charges was pushed through by some horrid Socialists who believe it's OK to spend somebody else's money. And no, it wasn't the Democrats who did it. A few rounds of that and you face big trouble unless "something" is in place to invest premium surpluses from salad health days for predictable later decrepitude. You haven't got there yet, but steps are being taken - in the nick of time IMHO.