The reason Republicans can’t “come together” on a repeal-and-replacement plan for Obamacare is that the American people haven't come together on what they want.

True, polls show Obamacare remains unpopular.

But the various Republican replacement proposals have polled even worse.

And when you break down the answers, Obamacare is unpopular-ish.

Americans, for example, like the idea of preventing insurance carriers from denying coverage to people who have pre-existing conditions.

Similarly, Americans like compelling an insurance company to keep a child on a parent's policy until the child is 26 years old.

Americans wish to prevent insurance carriers from “discriminating” on price based on their projections of who is more likely to use health care.

When asked whether they believe “health care is a right”, many polls find a majority of Americans say yes.

But Obamacare was designed to continue the march towards a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system -- a type of cradle-to-grave “Medicare for all”.

Under the so-called single-payer system, the federal government becomes the insurer, eradicating private health care insurance.

So “single-payer” means that the American taxpayer is paying for the insurance -- and all the overhead costs of a bloated, inefficient, bureaucratic federal government that faces no competition or incentive to be cost-efficient.

Obamacare was just a steppingstone along that path.

It was intended to fail, given the Democrats’ real goal of Canadian-style, taxpayer-paid health care.

Barack Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, said: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14% of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody ... A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we've got to take back the House."”

Later, then-president Obama reiterated his stance, with the qualification that if starting “from scratch” he'd have a single-payer system.

Never mind that Claude Castonguay, the “father of Quebec Medicare”, criticized his own invention, and said that the mistake was not encouraging more private-sector participation.

In the '60s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee on health care reform.

He urged Quebec, his home province, to enact government-administered health care, paid for by tax levies on its citizens. Quebec obliged.

But 40 years later Castonguay, serving as chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care in 2008, said the system was in “crisis”.

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” said Castonguay. “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Better late to Economics 101 than never.

The GOP took a big step this week toward fulfilling its promise to repeal and replace Obamacare by passing a procedural vote to debate the issue in the Senate.

Now comes the hard part.

Elder is a best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host.