"Not celebration, but relief."

Those were Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's words tonight in response to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's claims that those on the left were "celebrating" the defeat of his Godawful "Skinny Repeal" bill late Thursday night. And that's a perfect description of how I feel, for several reasons:

• 1. This wasn't so much a case of an "Actively Positive" thing happening (as was the case with, say, the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision) as it was stopping a negative thing (as was the case with the King v. Burwell SCOTUS decision, which actually was announced the very same day as Obergefell). That is to say, it's not that a good piece of legislation passed, it's that a bad piece of legislation was blocked. This isn't to minimize the importance of what just happened tonight (not just in terms of healthcare policy, but also the state of our democratic process, legislative norms and of course the ramifications for the rest of this ongoing nightmare we call the Trump Administration), but it does tend to dampen my emotional response a bit.

• 2. As I keep stressing: There are real problems with the ACA as it currently stands, and some of them require more than simple "tweaks" as some ACA defenders are prone towards describing them. All of these problems are definitely fixable, but most of those solutions still won't be easy to push through. Furthermore, these issues are exacerbated by two other problems:

• 3. THE CLOCK IS TICKING for 2018: The final carrier rate filing deadline is rapidly approaching; the carriers need to make their final decisions about how much to charge next year soon...assuming they decide to stick around the individual market next year at all, which isn't a guaranteed thing, especially due to...

• 4. THE TRUMP SABOTAGE FACTOR will now almost certainly go into overdrive. I'm about 90% certain that Trump will indeed pull the plug on Cost Sharing Reduction reimbursement payments staring next month (August), which could still devastate the indy market almost instantly. Of course, Congressional Republicans could resolve the CSR issue in about 5 minutes with a simple, 87-word bill which would receive unanimous consent from every Democrat in both the House and Senate as long as it was either standalone or not attached to some other poison pill piece of legislation.

  For that matter, while the individual mandate repeal died with the "Skinny Repeal" bill failing, House Republicans have also started pushing through a different bill which would prevent the IRS from enforcing the individual mandate anyway, causing the exact same problems. And even if that doesn't happen, HHS Sec. Tom Price could simply start issuing hundreds of thousands of highly-questionable "hardship exemptions" letting pretty much everyone off the hook for the mandate penalty anyway...which, once again, would amount to the same fallout.

...and so on and so forth.

HOWEVER, having said all of that, for the moment, I'm going to allow myself the most basic of celebration anyway. I think we've earned it...