Republicans in Congress do not normally require exhortation to wreak havoc on the American people; it’s in their legislative DNA. But last week brought the spectacle of President Trump alternately sweet-talking and threatening recalcitrant members of the party in the House of Representatives in an attempt to salvage Speaker Paul Ryan’s long-awaited, ill-advised and short-lived attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

In the end, the deal could not be sealed, and, in the face of certain defeat, Ryan and Trump withdrew the legislation before a vote. And a good thing this failure was, too. In its final form, the Republican bill — the American Health Care Act — would have resulted in 14 million people losing health insurance coverage in the first year alone, a number rising to 24 million over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It would have sharply reduced subsidies for purchasing insurance, rolled back Medicaid funding and eliminated federal standards for minimum benefits that health insurance policies must provide under the law. And yes, the billions of dollars in taxes on wealthy households and businesses that help finance the ACA would have been taken off the books.

Naturally, this program did not attract any Democratic support. A few moderate Republicans understandably thought it was going too far; remarkably, a larger group of far-right members constituting the House Freedom Caucus thought it didn’t go far enough in eradicating the ACA, or Obamacare. In the end, they were the ones who sank this particular ship — as they have so many others.

Trump and Ryan have signaled that they are ready to move on. “We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future,” Ryan said Friday after the legislation was pulled. We suspect that in their heart of hearts, quite a few Republicans are just as glad the repeal-and-replace effort, on which they have lavished so much rhetoric over the past seven years, has gone by the boards. To be sure, it helped them get elected and was successful in undermining public support for the ACA, but in the end they must have realized a couple of uncomfortable truths.

One is that their party has no answer to the question of how to devise a better alternative to the Obamacare they despise so thoroughly. They had seven years to do so, and the bill their leaders finally brought forth this winter was a walking debacle. The second, discussed by Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank in Sunday’s New York Times, is a central insight of the field of behavioral science, called loss aversion. “As numerous studies have shown,” Frank writes, “the pain of losing something you already have is much greater than the pleasure of having gained it in the first place.” As Frank notes, that would hold true both for millions of people who have gained health insurance coverage under the ACA and for representatives who hold seats in Congress.

Now that repeal-and-replace seems to be dead and buried, Trump could take up the Democrats’ offer to negotiate some improvements in the Affordable Care Act, which might attract enough support from moderate Republicans to pass. Or he could seek to sabotage the ACA through the regulatory powers the law invests in the executive branch. Or, as Frank suggests, the president could think big and embrace a truly great alternative, a cheaper, universal, single-payer, Medicare-for-all system — such as the one U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont intends to propose. That would have the advantage of actually making people’s lives better, while sticking it to the members of the Freedom Caucus who humiliated the president last week. Maybe it’s a win-win situation for the guy who promised to win so much we would all get sick of winning. At least now people can still afford to get sick, of winning or anything else.