The Washington Free Beacon's Ellison Barber shed light on a division in the GOP caucus over whether the party ought to focus on "repairing" or "replacing" Obamacare Thursday on Fox News.
Barber said some Republican members in blue districts feel compelled to discuss the Affordable Care Act in terms of "repair" as opposed to "repeal" out of political concerns.
However, Republicans are not likely to embrace the "repair" mantra as a whole because of the increasingly apparent fundamental flaws in the legislation, Barber said. The problem, according to the Free Beacon writer, is the GOP caucus has yet to coalesce around a firm legislative alternative to Obamacare.
Nonetheless, most Republicans feel it would be unwise to jump in front of a metaphoric train wreck when the party has the option of pursuing a replacement bill, Barber said:
ALISYN CAMEROTA: Except that, they don't really stand a change of repealing it right now. I mean as part of the calculus that they know, it is the law of the land and they don't have the numbers to repeal it so how are they going to be able to live with it?
ELLISON BARBER: Right, they don't. And they will try to make changes which we have seen them try to do. For example, the cancelled plans, where they say wait a minute, this is a promise you made and you should stick to it. But what we're seeing is that some of those things they want to change to try to make the law better can't actually be changed, so that's why the vast majority of Republicans are going to look at this and say they don't have an issue with just one aspect of the law, it's that they think that the entire piece of legislation is fundamentally flawed, so they want to repeal it to replace it with their own provisions. The problem is is that leadership hasn't acknowledged that the Republican party as a whole a plan, their alternate plan that they've all agreed on, there is no consensus on that. I interviewed Representative Tom Price for the Free Beacon a little while back, and he has his own plan that he proposed three times since 2009. The point that he made to me was that there is consensus that everyone in the Republican party realizes healthcare is important and there were problems in the old system that need to be fixed. The issue is they haven't quite found the consensus on how they're going to fix it. But I do think that it is pretty strongly felt across the board that Obamacare isn't the answer, and you're seeing with case and point millennials -- 57 percent are saying they don't approve of it anymore. So the problems too, keep going.