Why Republicans are balking at replacing Obamacare, again

Gasps went up from the Senate floor two years ago when Republican Sen. John McCain gave his late-night thumbs-down to the GOP’s rollback of Obamacare. His vote against his own party broke a tie and snatched the controversial Affordable Care Act from the jaws of death.

Senator McCain, who had campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare, criticized the hasty and secretive process in which Senate Republicans threw together their bill, dubbed “skinny repeal.” But as he wrote in his memoir, “The Restless Wave,” the bigger problem was that the bill, while likely causing Obamacare’s collapse, “offered literally nothing with which to replace it.”

The late senator’s lesson about an empty replacement is worth