This brainfart from the Republican speaker of the house dates to 2013, not the aftermath of his failure to pass 2017's universally-loathed Obamacare replacement plan. Snopes:

WHAT'S TRUE



House Speaker Ryan said he would not give up on destroying the United States' health care system. WHAT'S FALSE



The statement was a gaffe that was taken out of context, not an actual admission of intent. … Although Ryan did say "we're not going to give up on destroying the healthcare system for the American people," this was merely a gaffe, not a statement of intent. Ryan was referring to the Affordable Care Act and his efforts to not let that law destroy the health care system.

This is fair context, but "merely a gaffe" handwaves what makes gaffes interesting. Lack of intent is not intrinsic to gaffes. Indeed, the fact gaffes tend to reveal intent is embodied by a term a journalists use for political ones to distinguish them from lesser varieties: the Kinsley Gaffe.

The first appearance in print of "Kinsley's Law of Gaffes" may have been on January 17, 2008, when Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in a post about a Democratic candidates' debate in his New Yorker blog: No article or blog post of this kind can be complete without a reference to (Michael) Kinsley's Law of Gaffes, which states that a gaffe occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Perhaps this should be supplemented by the notion of a Deductive Slip, meaning something a politician says, however inadvertently, that can be shoehorned into a pre-existing "narrative."

Kinsley himself points out that in political cases, the supposed gaffe is never animated by surprise. Just as everyone knew, for example, that Rush Limbaugh had a low opinion of women before revealing it in a "gaffe," everyone already knows Paul Ryan didn't need Obamacare to become an Ayn Randian laissez-faire dork. What he is has already been established; the gaffe is haggling over the price.