This is the GOP's plan B for Obamacare

[herding cats]

Trump signed an EO back in mid February telling the IRS to stop enforcing the mandate.

Here's an article from then explaining what he did.

Trump's IRS stages a stealth attack on Obamacare

The Internal Revenue Service has become the first agency to follow President Trump’s directive to start undermining the Affordable Care Act.

In a quiet rule change, but an important one, the IRS has told tax preparers and software firms that it won’t automatically reject tax returns that fail to state whether the tax filer had health insurance during the year. That effectively loosens enforcement of the ACA’s individual mandate. It appears to be a direct response to Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order requiring federal agencies “minimize...the economic and regulatory burdens of the Act.”

We observed at the time that the executive order would cripple ACA insurance exchanges, not only by signaling the Trump Administration’s open hostility to Obamacare, but by kicking a leg out from the regulatory stool supporting the act.

The IRS action its the first manifestation of that. The agency hasn’t announced its rule change publicly, but it was picked up by Peter Suderman of Reason and Kathleen Pender of the San Francisco Chronicle, who both reported it Tuesday.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-irs-obamacare-20170215-story.html

My guess is they're now planning to let it bleed out and then blame Obama and the Democrats in 2018. Be prepared to counter this BS when and if it pops up.

[AJT]

1. Exactly. May have been the plan all along.

[herding cats]

5. I think Ryan really did want his bill to pass.

They are just too divided, and disorganized to get anything that requires compromise to pass.

[Warpy]

2. That EO isn't worth the paper Bannon wrote it on

"Don't do the jobs you were hired to do" is not a legal order in any sense of the word.

[herding cats]

3. I've seen it argued both ways.

I guess we'll know for sure soon enough.

[Idoru]

4. How effective is this going to be, though?

I mean, most people just know they will be penalized if caught and most will want health coverage anyway.

[herding cats]

6. That many people will carry insurance anyway is the burr in their plan.

If enough people do then it's ineffective. I had a conversation the other day about how this ACA fight has had the opposite effect on several Republican voters. They've actually learned the ACA was Obamacare and want to keep their coverage.

We'll see how it plays out, but it is the hope within the GOP that this works for them.