I know it's academic, but if the ACA *weren't* passed,

[no_hypocrisy]

where did Mitch McConnell plan to get the money to fund his beloved tax cuts?

Would he have added it to the deficit? Or which program(s) would he raid and/or eliminate?

[marylandblue]

1. Deficits don't matter under Republican Presidents

[yallerdawg]

2. The Republican Party remains firmly committed to 'trickle down' economics...

and will - as they always have when in power - gladly add to the deficit to give the 'job creators' more money ('chips' to gamble with).

And then the Democrats have to clean up the mess when everything goes to shit.

[unblock]

3. if it weren't for the aca, there wouldn't be the 0.9% and 3.9% surtaxes on the rich

so there would be no need for that part of their tax cutting.

that said, the greedy piggies always want more anyway, and they're looking beyond the aca for more ways to kill poor people for profit.

in the end, they'll settle for only killing half the poor people and paying for the rest of the tax cuts with an exploding deficit, like they always do.

[JoeStuckInOH]

4. Here's a thought... if the ACA weren't ever passed, Trump wouldn't be president.

The bulk of his campaign and agenda was repealing Obamacare. So no Obamacare = no Trump. Given the passage of the ACA had led to Trump's presidency (which will then lead inexorably to destruction of America) the logical progression of questioning takes us to:

Ultimately, was passing the ACA worth a Trump presidency?

[Cosmocat]

5. If it wasn't ACA it would have been something else

ACA is the REPUBLICAN version of health care reform, which was ginned up to be the greatest threat to democracy in history.

HEALTH CARE REFORM.

If it wasn't that, they would have been Dodd Frank or some other legislation - they did the same bullshit with Benghazi, a situation that occurred a half dozen times under W, not to mention saint reagen having hundreds of marines killed by having them holed up in a hotel in fucking Lebanon.

Hillaries e-mails ... with half the R politicians in the country using their own private servers

The WHAT is completely not relevant.

[still_one]

6. The ACA almost did go down, and is on shakey ground. As long as the make-up of Congress doesn't

change, the actual ACA repeal will be on hold for the time being, which is why 2018 is so critical. The problem right now is they are trying to curtail the subsidies, and the legality of that is going through the courts now.

As to the OPs question, if they would have passed the skinny version, they would have used the subsidy money for the ACA, plus cut the entitlement programs to fund it. They are still going to try to do the later.

This is going to be a fight all the way