There’s an issue DeSantis has over Trump, if he wants to dig the 2017 Trump vs. Freedom Caucus fight out of the memory hole.
One big factor in Trump's 2016 victory is that he had a lot of support among DEMOCRATS. He picked the right side of that issue from a purely political standpoint.
I don't blame the GOP for refusing to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety. They had no reason to do it because of one important factor: the biggest beneficiaries of ObamaCare were older working adults who were facing rising health insurance costs but weren't old enough to qualify for Medicare. These people are a major part of the GOP base.
In other words, ObamaCare basically screwed younger (Democrat) voters for the benefit of older (Republican) voters. Some of us here on FR pointed this out from 2010 through 2016, and even went so far as to claim that ObamaCare was actually very popular among Republican voters.
My criticism of Ryan and the GOP is that they ended up proposing a half-assed "ObamaCare fix" that did nothing to address the underlying issues that were driving health insurance costs through the roof -- particularly in three areas: (1) mandatory coverage of all kinds of medical procedures that most people don't; (2) elimination of annual or lifetime coverage limits (think about that one: imagine buying insurance on your $400,000 home where the premium is based on the insurance company's expectation that they may have to pay $25 million to replace it); and (3) elimination of any restrictions on coverage for pre-existing conditions.
No, DeSantis has nothing on Trump here. Trump had the right political message even though it was comical and completely unworkable: "I'll make sure you get better health care, and it will cost less!"
He [Ryan] wanted to convert it from an entitlement program to being block funded by the Feds...which of course meant that unlike entitlements, it would have to be renewed in every budget.
This just means that Ryan was either delusional or was lying his ass off -- because he knew damn well that those "block funded" line items in the Federal budget would never disappear, would never decline, and in fact would grow faster than the rate of inflation indefinitely ... which means they basically WERE entitlements.