MEGAN MCARDLE: Republicans Should Kill Obamacare or Let It Die.

This was the problem that Democrats faced with Obamacare. Other countries, it was often observed, had a national guarantee of health insurance; surely, we could build a system very much like those. But the other countries had built their systems earlier, when there weren’t so many concrete towers already in the way. By the time Obamacare came on the scene, America already had government programs that were propping up health care for almost everyone in the country: tax-subsidized employer-sponsored health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA. No one was willing to shoulder the cost of knocking those things down and designing a rational, well-built structure to take their place, so instead the administration threw up an annex next to the Medicaid edifice, and tore down the little remaining patch of ground that wasn’t government-subsidized, and threw up a new tower to hold its residents.

The planning was haphazard, the work shoddily done, and the result kept threatening to collapse.

And yet it was locked in. That whole “political concrete” thing. For the enthusiasts, the very difficulty of alteration was not a bug but a feature, because it meant that it would be hard for Republicans to undo. So we were all left with a subpar system that is difficult to either repair or replace.

That is unfortunate, but it is now a fact, and Republicans, like so many opponents of Brutalist architecture, are going to have to contend with that reality. We cannot simply get rid of what Democrats built, and then perhaps, at some more convenient date, start over with a sounder design. The old structures are gone, and will not spring back up of their own accord if we knock down what’s there now. All you get from a hasty demolition is a big pile of rubble.

That works for me. Both for ObamaCare, and for pretty much every piece of Brutalist architecture ever.