We are part of more than Obamacare, no less.

Trump tweeted that the GOP would be "the party of health care", but Republican senators who met him said the president had given little detail on what their policies would look like if Obamacare was canceled.

In fact, there was little sign of outside enthusiasm for Trump's last movement among Republicans elected. The party paid a hefty price for the mid-term abrogation efforts in 2018 – voters named health care as their main problem in exit polls and 75 percent of those polled. who supported the Democrats.

In seeking to go beyond this, the GOP has shifted to a new message in recent months. Rather than defining the 2020 race as a choice between keeping Obamacare or abrogating it, they began to position the competition as a choice between government-run health care and the status quo.

Under Trump's leadership, Republican lawmakers warned that the Medicare for All democrats regime was a "socialist" policy that was too risky, disruptive, and costly.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a member of Parliament, supported the Democrats' bill, which would provide all Americans with a more generous version of Medicare, effectively eliminating private insurance. Several contenders to 2020, including Elizabeth Warren's Sense, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris had co-sponsored, while Beto O. Rourke seemed to have endorsed him during his tenure in the Senate but had yielded more recently in the presidential campaign. .

Some signs indicate that Republican attacks have produced some results, even as Trump's decision guarantees that the repeal will likely be the main message in 2020.

Support for Medicare for All has declined in some surveys. A poll conducted Tuesday by Quinnipiac University found that 43% of respondents thought the single payer principle was a "good idea", compared to 45% of those who said it was a "bad idea" . This is a decline in popularity from August 2017, shortly before Sanders introduced his bill, which enjoyed net support of 51% to 38%.

Single-payer advocates believe that they can strengthen their support by adopting the right approach to public relations.

"A policy that covers everyone and eliminates personal expenses … will be an incredibly popular program, but do we need to educate the public more?", Said Adam Gaffney, president of Physicians for a National Health Program. .

But even before the last survey, many Democratic candidates were subtly altering their own message by moving away from the single payer principle to more gradual approaches building on Obamacare's existing structure.

In January, Harris told a CNN city hall that the Americans were in favor of replacing private plans with a single payer program, while House progressives had released a new single-payer bill the following month. but few presidential candidates followed their example.

Instead, they pivoted to arguments that Americans should have the option to buy a public plan like Medicaid or Medicare, do not tax them.

O 'Rourke, who expressed his support for Bill Sanders as a Senate candidate last year, said this month that he had redesigned his position and that he was interested in legislation that would allow individuals to subscribe to a public plan if they wished. "This allows people to maintain employer-based insurance, which many want to do," he said.

Several Democratic presidential candidates who co-sponsored Sanders' Medicare For All bill defended the right – without explicitly giving up the support of the single payer – that a public option would ultimately achieve the same objective as the legislation. Gillibrand, for example, presented a Medicare buy-in that caps premiums at 4 or 5% of her income as "the fastest way to get" for a single payer because she predicted that clients would voluntarily decide to register there instead of private insurance.

The same Quinnipiac survey that found that support for the loss of a single payer strongly supported an optional buy-in of Medicare, 51% said of it as "good idea", compared with 30% who l & rsquo; Called it a "bad idea". Some polls also revealed some confusion among voters, many of whom thought that a public option was what "Medicare for All" meant in the first place.

"I think people want more health care and that most are relatively open about how to achieve it," said Senator Brian Schatz of D-Hawaii, author of a bill which would create an option to purchase for Medicaid plans, said NBC News.

The single payer will always be in the foreground if Sanders wins the nomination or if activists can encourage the lost Democrats to return to his plan.

But for now, the two parties seem to agree in simple health care messages for 2020: "Build Obamacare with a public option," for Democrats, and "abrogate Obamacare first, then discuss," for Trump and the GOP.