I know it’s wrong, but I will admit to taking great joy in watching Senator Orrin Hatch chair the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the latest Republican effort to repeal Obamacare.

The hearing room and the hallways leading to it were packed with people in wheelchairs who were there to protest against the bill, which would have gutted the protection for people with pre-existing conditions buying health insurance. Hatch tried to call the hearing to order, and nobody came to order. The senators sat there with the deer in the headlights look for a while, and then got up and left. The Capitol Police then forcibly dragged the disabled demonstrators out of the room.

After the reeking public had been removed, the senators returned to hold the public hearing, without any sense of irony. Hatch has been in the Senate for 40 years, and I think the defining image of that career will be him staring blankly as people in wheelchairs are dragged out of the hearing room so he can hold a hearing on a bill that specifically addresses their health care, without actually having to hear from them.

Anyway, the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare has failed yet again. They are trying to push it through as a budget adjustment, which apparently takes only 50 votes in the Senate, as opposed to going through the regular process which would take 60 votes to get a bill passed. The deadline for adjusting the budget ended today, so they’re stuck.

The Republicans look like idiots. For 7 years “repeal and replace” has been their mantra, but nobody ever bothered put a real replacement together. The Rand Paul faction of the party doesn’t think the federal government should be involved in health insurance at all. So getting that group on board with a replacement program will be difficult.

Hatch is more mainstream, and believes that magic health savings accounts will solve the problem. That’s right, if the poor did a better job managing the money they don’t have, they wouldn’t need federal help. Who says he’s out of touch?

So the bill to repeal, without a real replacement (the idea was to make it the states’ problem), officially crashed again when it was clear they didn’t have the votes to pass it.

That’s not to say that Obamacare is perfect. It was based on the assumption that lots of young, healthy people with low health care expenses would find the idea of buying health insurance so appealing that they would all run out and buy policies.

That didn’t happen. Partly, the law keeps people on their parents’ policies, usually provided by an employer, until age 26. So those people are out of the market. Many more have jobs that provide health insurance — the employer mandate —s o they are covered without being in the individual market.

The end result is that the individual market — people who are self-employed, work for businesses small enough to be exempt from the employer mandate, and of course the unemployed and disabled, are left in the individual market

If healthy people in the individual market decide to pay a modest penalty instead of buying an insurance policy, the whole concept of pooled risk fails. Even if somebody qualifies for a subsidy, the insurance is expensive. Theoretically, I have health insurance. I also have a $6,750 deductible, out of pocket, before it will pay for so much as a Q-tip. My knee needs to last a couple more ski seasons before I can get Medicare.

The Democrats are lining up behind Bernie Sanders’ single-payer, “Medicare for everybody” plan. Nobody has any idea how to pay for it, other than what is now spent on insurance premiums would get redirected to the government plan. The insurance companies would no longer be needed, and they aren’t enthusiastic about a plan that puts them out of business (though it couldn’t happen to a more deserving group). So that’s going nowhere.

There is the alternative of the two parties sitting down and tinkering with the parts of Obamacare that aren’t working and finding solutions that improve things. Those are going to be wonkish adjustments that lack the drama of repeal and replace. “Adjust the actuarial assumptions” isn’t a very good campaign slogan. And dramatic as it is for those in the individual market, the vast majority of Americans get employer-based insurance and are spared the problem of having to figure it out for themselves.

But the choice seems fairly obvious. Congress can do its job and fix what needs to be fixed. Or we can spend another couple of years with Orrin Hatch watching dozens of disabled people dragged out of hearing rooms while the Republicans try to knock 20 or 30 million people off health insurance.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.