(CNN) The Senate Republican health care bill is dead and the prospect of a show-me vote on full repeal without replacement is a zombie stalking the halls of Capitol Hill. Over at the White House, President Donald Trump began Wednesday with a pair of tweets demanding some kind of resurrection, but even now, what he truly wants is an open question.

Mostly sidelined during the Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's ill-fated sausage-making, Trump on Tuesday passed the health care buck back across the aisle. "We'll let Obamacare fail," he said , harking back an old campaign trail threat, "and then the Democrats are going to come to us."

The logic here -- that voters will blame Democrats for troubles in a market the Republican President is now openly rooting against -- is dubious in its own right. The polling goes further. More than six-in-ten people surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation this spring said they would fault the GOP "for any problems with the Affordable Care Act going forward."

Comments by top Democrats over the past 24 hours suggest they are approaching the dynamic with a giddy caution. Their public overtures to Republicans in the aftermath of the Senate bill's collapse may be completely genuine, but also have a tinge of Schadenfreude. "The door to bipartisanship is open right now," Minority Leader Chuck Schumer likes to say. "Republican leadership only needs to walk through it."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: "The door to bipartisanship is open right now" https://t.co/0GOf2RwE1y — CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 18, 2017

But an overindulgence in the daily politics risks obscuring an equally plain and potentially more significant outcome. With the GOP's failure to deliver on its years-old promise to ditch Obamacare in favor of some amorphous upgrade, the future of health care policy in America now firmly resides with the Democrats and their resurgent left.

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