Haste makes waste, and House Republicans have wasted what goodwill and public opinion was once on their side in the debate over the Affordable Care Act.

In other words, they’ve managed to accomplish the miraculous: making ObamaCare popular with a majority of Americans despite their own sustained, seven-year campaign to discredit the law. In April, Gallup published a poll showing that 55 percent of Americans now support ObamaCare — the first time it has had majority support since 2012.

The reasons for this reversal are clear.

First, the House’s replacement, the AHCA, is simply a bad piece of legislation. One example of this is its use of high risk pools, which are Republicans’ solution for providing insurance to people with preexisting conditions while lowering costs for healthy and wealthy people.

The pools have been tried before and failed miserably because rates were simply unaffordable. House Republicans’ solution to this is to throw $8 billion at the insurance industry over the next five years to shore up the pools — until they inevitably crash and burn because they are financially unsustainable.

One of the main arguments against the ACA in recent years has been that insurance premiums are on the rise and deductibles are too high for those who don’t have employer-provided health plans and earn too much to qualify for tax credits.

The problem is that in Pennsylvania that’s between 1 and 2 percent of people, according to state Insurance Commissioner Teresa Miller. For the vast majority the ACA’s model works well. The state’s uninsured rate has declined from 10 percent to about 6.4 percent, and 75 percent of people who use the ACA marketplaces find good coverage for less than $100 per month, Miller said this week.

If financial instability is the problem, the AHCA creates more, not less.

Second, Republicans went back on their word when it comes to how these kinds of laws to be created, debated and voted upon.

Here’s an excerpt from the party’s 2010 “A Pledge to America”: “We will ensure that bills are debated and discussed in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives. No more hiding legislative language from the minority party, opponents, and the public. Legislation should be understood by all interested parties before it is voted on.”

The ACHA that House Republicans passed last week was on display for 16 hours before it went up for a vote, and still hasn’t been scored by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

If you think that doesn’t matter, consider that neither President Donald Trump nor many of the House members who voted for the bill have seemed to know what’s in it.

Case-in-point: the possibility that the law’s provision allowing states to weaken or eliminate essential health benefit standards could negatively affect health plans people get through their employers. How does that square with Republicans’ recent promises to keep consumer protections in place?

The bottom line is that the AHCA is a bill about politics, not policy.

For years Republicans have promised their constituents that they would “repeal and replace” the ACA with something better. But as it became clear that the party lacked the imagination and cohesiveness necessary to produce cogent health care legislation, the goal shifted from doing the right thing to doing anything — just so members could say they did.

That’s a repeat of the mistakes Democrats made in 2010 when they passed the ACA into law.

The AHCA remains a bad scrip for Pennsylvania and American in general. And it is unclear whether Senate Republicans can craft responsible policy out of the mess their colleagues in the House saddled them with.