The Graham-Cassidy bill that is supposed to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with something less horrible has been on life support ever since Senator John McCain decided to vote against it because the Democrats didn’t like it (I am not making that up). Today it officially died.

Sen. Ted Cruz said today that he doesn’t support the latest Obamacare repeal plan drafted by Sens. Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham and suggested that the proposal also lacks the vote of Sen. Mike Lee.

The Texas Republican said at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin that he and Lee had offered amendments to the Graham-Cassidy proposal that would go further to bring down Obamacare premiums but that the changes weren’t included in the latest draft of the bill.

Health care is not my thing but my overarching observation in this debate is that it is obvious that few, if any, of the participants understand how insurance works. If you think pre-existing conditions should be covered and you don’t want to use the force of the government to make people buy a product they neither want nor need, you might very well be one of them. Any plan based on the purchase of health insurance simply can’t work without a massive infusion of federal money to cover the insurance losses or the coerced purchase of insurance products that are financially inappropriate for them. At that point, we are at single-payer lite.

I’m not really sure why the federal government is involved in what have historically been state functions (licensing of health care and regulating insurance) or how we all decided that every man, woman, and child having health insurance that covered routine medical care was actually a good idea.

Be that as it may, we are here. Right now the best hope I see is to allow ObamaCare to fail in an utterly spectacular fashion and try to build something from the ashes. And that something, hopefully, will be built without federal influence.