“The political fallout from the botched launch of the health-care law is presenting congressional Democrats with one of their toughest tests of party loyalty in the five years of the Obama administration,” the Washington Post reports.

“House Republicans are expected to pass a bill Friday that could dramatically undermine the law. And after years of trying to impale the initiative, GOP leaders are hopeful that the political turmoil over the rollout will provide them the support of a sizable bloc of Democrats.”

The Hill:
“The vote puts Democratic leaders in a pickle, caught between
the desire to maintain party unity and the propensity to allow
threatened rank-and-file members to vote their districts with
re-election in mind.”

First Read: “The question is how many Democrats vote for the legislation… Twenty or 30 red-state Dems voting for
it is one thing; but double or triple that amount would be a rebuke and
would signal that House Dems weren’t satisfied with the supposed fix
Obama announced.”

“If I had the problem, saying you’re sorry doesn’t help me worth a damn at the polls, unless I can staple your remarks to the ballot.”

— Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), quoted by the New York Daily News, on the bungled health care law roll out.

“We fumbled the rollout on this health-care law.”

— President Obama, at a White House news conference.

The White House “will announce a plan for allowing insurance companies to continue offering existing individual insurance policies even if they fall short of the coverage standards set by the 2010 health-care law,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The move is designed to ease the problem created by the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of policies in recent weeks. It is likely to make it easier for the White House to dissuade Democrats from voting for a House Republican bill due to come to a vote on Friday that the Obama administration believes goes too far in trying to address the cancellation problem.”

First Read: “We said this repeatedly during the government shutdown: The political party that’s unified is typically winning, while the party that’s divided is losing. And what happened during the shutdown? The united Democrats — who didn’t budge on major changes to President Obama’s health-care law — won that fight, while Republicans — who were divided on the merits of shutting down the government — ended up as the losers. Now the situation has flipped. After a month of bad news regarding the health-care law (the federal website not working well, the cancellation notices for some who get their insurance in the private marketplace, and the low enrollment figures), it’s Democrats who are divided and Republicans who are united. And the Democratic dam is now broken.”

Wonk Wire: How a political fix will actually undermine Obamacare

A source in a closed-door House GOP conference meeting told National Review that Speaker John Boehner said “targeted strikes” would ultimately undermine President Obama’s health care law.

Said Boehner: “Remember the strategy for stopping Obamacare we laid out to you back in July. It had two components: Aggressive, coordinated oversight, and targeted legislative strikes aimed at shattering the legislative coalition the president has used to force his law on the nation. That plan is being executed as we speak.”