Lucy just snatched the football away, again. Republicans assured us that this year they really would, seriously, roll out their alternative to Obamacare. Or, maybe, not.

But I have the sense that some political analysts still don’t understand why the GOP keeps sheering away from proposing an alternative. It’s not because Republican leaders are cowards. It’s not because there are sharp divisions within the party about the shape of their plan. The reason Republicans haven’t offered an alternative is because there is no alternative.

Specifically, if you want to propose some other, less-intrusive system that won’t cause 10 or 15 or 20 million people to lose health insurance, it can’t be done. The Affordable Care Act looks the way it does because it has to.

My sense is that even reformocons, who imagine themselves more open-minded than the party’s base, still don’t get that. But the logic has been clear from the beginning.

Start with a goal almost everyone at least pretends to support: making coverage available to people with preexisting conditions. How can you do that? Well, unless you simply want to provide government insurance, you have to prohibit discrimination based on medical history by private insurers: guaranteed issue and community rating.

But just doing that isn’t enough, because community rating on its own means that people don’t sign up until they get sick, and you have a very poor risk pool. So you have to include an individual mandate, requiring that everyone get coverage. Note, by the way, that the individual mandate is essential in a way the employer mandate isn’t.

Yet you can’t have an individual mandate without some way of making insurance affordable for lower-income families. So the mandate has to be backed by means-tested subsidies.

And there you are: community rating, individual mandate, subsidies — ObamaRomneycare! Everything else is details.

True, single-payer would be an alternative, and I’d be for it if I thought it had any chance of happening. But that’s an alternative to the left; there is no alternative to the right.

That’s why Obamacare opponents really had to stop it before it happened. As long as it was just a plan, they could insist that it was unworkable — that it would not, in fact, cover the uninsured, that costs would soar, that it would cripple the economy. And the official GOP position is indeed that the law has failed; who you gonna believe, us or your lying eyes? But none of the bad things that were supposed to happen, did. And the repeal-and-replace crowd cannot come up with an alternative, because there isn’t one.