We're not in ACA Repeal-and-Replaceville. We're in Cassidy-Collinstown

Peter Suderman argues that The GOP Accidentally Replaced Obamacare:

Republicans, having failed to repeal Obamacare, have stumbled, almost accidentally, into replacing it. For better and for worse, and with little coherent vision at work, they are making Obamacare their own. And over time, they are likely to embrace it.

There's a good degree of truth in this. Suderman runs through the panoply of Republican legislative and administrative whacks at the ACA's structure and benefits on the federal and state level: individual mandate repeal; creation of a parallel market of non-ACA-compliant plans; regulatory hurdles to Medicaid enrollment aimed particularly at the ACA Medicaid expansion population; repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board for Medicare. And Suderman adds a creative future-cast twist: If Democrats take power and pursue a fully or quasi-single payer system, Republicans may end up defending the relatively moderate -- and Republican-moderated (or adulterated) -- status quo, i.e. the ACA.

Suderman's neat conceit leaves a core factor out of the equation, though: funding.

Yes, Peter Suderman, the ACA covers the short-term as well as long-term uninisured.

Many people poring over the data still emerging from the ACA's first open enrollment season seem not to grasp  the volatility of Americans' insurance status.  Take Peter Suderman:

Kaiser’s survey finds that the majority of previously uninsured lacked coverage for two years, and that 45 percent reported not having coverage for five years. Which means that more than half of the previously uninsured were covered at some relatively recent point.

Now, many of those people clearly were having difficulty getting coverage for some reason—perhaps as a ripple effect of the recession, perhaps because of some other factor. But many of them appear not to be completely uninsurable. These are not people who couldn’t get insurance under any circumstance. They’re people who didn’t have it for the last several years.

Obamacare’s supporters would no doubt say that the law was designed to help those people just as much as it was designed to help those who never had coverage at all. That’s an entirely reasonable position. But when we talk about Obamacare’s coverage effects, it’s important to be clear about who is being covered: a sizable number of people who were already insured, as well as people who were both eligible for coverage and covered at one point, but had lost their coverage.

It's true that the ACA is designed to help the long-term uninsured. It's also designed to help the millions who fall out of and back into insured status every year. Last fall, healthcare scholars Rick Curtis and John Graves brought those millions into focus: