Ryan health plan died of bad politics: Christian Schneider

On the morning of May 27th, 1995, Republican Rep. Sam Brownback's legislative director made his first appearance on C-Span's Washington Journal cable television show. Fielding phone calls from viewers early on a Saturday morning, the 25-year old congressional staffer passionately argued for free-market based changes in the American health care system as he fired off budget numbers like a Gatling gun.

"We would like to offer more choices to health care recipients," he nervously told viewers. "We would like to instill private sector forces such as choice," he said, adding that seniors should be able to both choose their own doctor and "have an incentive to go and save some money in the health care market."

Nearly 22 years later, Paul Ryan stood in front of the nation as House speaker, explaining why his dream of free-market oriented health reform was dead.

Just two weeks earlier, Ryan had delivered a PowerPoint presentation explaining that his recently introduced bill was "the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing Obamacare." But on Friday, after the Obamacare "repeal and replace" bill fell short of the votes it needed, Ryan was struggling to explain why. “We were a 10-year opposition party, where being against things was easy to do,” he said. “You just had to be against it. Now, in three months’ time, we tried to go to a governing party where we actually had to get 216 people to agree with each other on how we do things.”

The whole affair was a catastrophe for the Republican Party in general and for Ryan specifically. The GOP didn't become a "governing party" in three months — it had seven years to come up with a plan to placate both moderates and conservatives alike. In the next election cycle, voters will be especially skeptical Republican candidates up and down the ballot will carry through on their promises.

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It didn't help Ryan that his negotiating partner was a president with virtually no knowledge of the changes he sought to make and who proved to be unpersuasive to representatives that needed coercing.

But even Ryan's biggest fans have to concede that the strategy on the health bill was bungled from the start. Clearly, House leadership thought it could introduce new health care legislation in the same way Beyoncé drops new albums, surprising America and skipping the critical review period. But Congress has no Beyhive, and none of the major conservative groups that would normally cheer Obamacare's repeal roared in approval when the secret bill was made public.

Further, rather than staking out a negotiating position on the right, the bill attempted to thread the needle between free-market solutions and keeping as much of Obamacare as possible. This angered both conservatives and moderates, so both factions we pulling on the plan from both sides. Had Ryan initially proposed something more conservative, he likely could have negotiated his way back to the middle.

This week, Liberal magazine The New Republic declared the health care fiasco to be "The Death of Paul Ryan, Policy Genius," further deriding the speaker as more "con artist than wonk." But this analysis has it exactly backwards; since his days as a legislative staffer, few have had a more thorough grasp on policy than Ryan. It was only Ryan's expertise in budget matters that made it possible to discuss reforming entitlement programs in polite company.

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He routinely turned down chances to run for president because he enjoyed crafting sweeping proposals to right America's fiscal ship. (Among them, the "Path to Prosperity," the "Roadmap for America's Future," the "Tollway to Tax Cuts," and "the "Boulevard to Balanced Budgets." Note: I may have made a couple of those up.)

But crafting commonsense proposals and herding members of Congress into voting for them are two different things — especially when your proposals are rescinding a benefit granted by a previous administration. The talents needed for writing legislation and strategizing its passage are often in conflict; it is as if the Green Bay Packers ordered Aaron Rodgers to play linebacker just because he's a football player.

In January of 2014, amid rumors he was in line to become speaker of the House, Ryan firmly denied his interest. "I’m more of a policy person," he told a gathering in San Antonio, Texas. "I prefer spending my days on policy and my weekends at home with my family."

Three years after the fact, maybe it's time that we started believing him.

Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where this piece first appeared.

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