The GOP’s healthcare gambit is an elaborate parliamentarian ploy, designed for winning rather than going down in high-principled flames in a Senate filibuster. Phase I is a head fake, a means of exploiting the reconciliation rules that allow you to dodge the filibuster so long as your bill meets the revenue-related standards.  Here is the play:  You go into reconciliation with a filibuster-proof Phase I bill, in which you give the left most of the goodies that are all they really care about (the stuff the conservatives refer to derisively as “entitlements”), and you give the right just enough from their wish-list to make them shut up for a little while and go along with the plan. The Rand Paul contingent makes enough noise (all of it innocent and principled) to make it seem that the left is dodging a bullet, has won a great victory, that the whole thing represents a capitulation by Trump, who turns out to be just another whore – one of the left’s own.  Then, after a few months of the left’s luxuriating in the sense that their achievement was real, you drop the hammer.  Phase II, which Trump has lacked the self-discipline to abstain from delicately telegraphing, is when you get to the heart of the reform, which is to remove all the Obamacare crap that effectively precluded a free market in healthcare and insurance – and to remove the ban on interstate offerings of insurance.  For all we know, the Republicans might even throw in tort reform.  The goal is that by the time we get to Phase II, which requires 60 votes in the Senate, the Democrats will have been sufficiently sated and sedated that the Republicans will have a reasonable chance of stealing the requisite 10 Democrat votes.

Not saying it would work, just that it is the only plan that has a chance of working.