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House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (R-Wis.) decision to pull legislation to reconfigure the nation’s health-care system is a major setback to President Trump and the GOP. For seven years, Republicans promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. Their failure to deliver on this promise exposes intraparty divisions that will not be easily healed. (Eric Patashnik and Jonathan Oberlander, 3/27)

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act may have celebrated prematurely at the demise last week of the House Republicans’ proposal for its repeal. Yes, the most immediate threat to the future of Obamacare is dead, for now. And in the wake of the House fiasco, President Trump as well as some Senate Republicans have made noises about reaching out to Democrats to shore up the health insurance program. But the Trump White House and congressional Republicans still have it within their power to damage the prospects of health coverage for millions of Americans, whether by actively undermining the Affordable Care Act by administrative fiat or by letting it wither by neglect. (Michael Hiltzik, 3/27)

The scope of Obamacare’s problems is small, but significant. While health-care costs have been going up less than normal in recent years and premiums for people insured by their employers have also been fairly stable, people who buy their own insurance through the Obamacare marketplaces saw premiums spike by an average of about 25 percent this year. Also, several insurers pulled out of the Obamacare exchanges in the past year, leaving 21 percent of exchange enrollees with just one insurance option and people in Knoxville, Tennessee with potentially no insurers at all. (Olga Khazan, 3/28)

After Republicans pulled their legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act last Friday, President Trump told The Washington Post, “The best thing politically is to let Obamacare explode.” Or he could light a match. Republicans may have conceded defeat in their legislative effort to get rid of Obamacare, but their guerrilla war to achieve its demise remains underway. (Steven Rattner, 3/28)

As President Trump licked his wounded ego Friday, he told The Post in an interview, “The best thing politically is to let Obamacare explode.” His Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, echoed that sentiment on “Meet the Press." (Jennifer Rubin, 3/27)

“I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” President Donald Trump told governors during a meeting last month. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” Nobody except everyone else. That is why the 2009 Democratic-controlled Congress spent a year debating and ironing out the details of what eventually became the Affordable Care Act. The two-part law and regulations total thousands of pages. Before passage, lawmakers met with insurers, hospitals, physicians and patient advocacy groups to build a consensus for what they all understood was a labyrinthine endeavor. (3/27)

Without a viable health care agenda of their own, Republicans now face a choice between two options: Obamacare and a gradual shift toward a single-payer system. The early signs suggest they will choose single payer. That would be the height of political irony, of course. Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Tom Price may succeed where left-wing dreamers have long failed and move the country toward socialized medicine. And they would do it unwittingly, by undermining the most conservative health care system that Americans are willing to accept. (David Leonhardt, 3/28)

When Roswell’s Tom Price moved from Congress to the executive branch as secretary of health and human services, he instantly gained the power to reshape much of the way health care works in this country, regardless of what becomes of Obamacare. Ironically, it’s Obamacare that gives him that ability... It also gives Price’s department the authority to grant the states waivers to the law’s requirements for health plans offered on their insurance exchanges, and that’s where this gets interesting. (Kyle Wingfield, 3/27)

Republicans have long hyped the need for a replacement bill by sowing the fear that Obamacare is imploding. Yet they hypocritically ignore their own complicity in creating the conditions for failure. Now that their bill has collapsed, the new mantra is to practice saying “I told you so,” in the event their self-fulfilling prophecy comes to fruition. (Lauren Stiller Rikleen, 3/28)

Officials at Connecticut’s health insurance exchange are betting some customers would welcome that tradeoff. The marketplace’s board recently voted to loosen the requirements on the size of insurance provider networks on plans sold to its customers starting next year. (Levin Becker, 3/28)

There are many lessons to be learned from the failure of the GOP health-care effort. An important one is that being a businessman, even a successful one, does not prepare you for the complexities of governing, any more than being a successful software engineer means you could easily become a great carpenter. (Paul Waldman, 3/27)