It is very hard to identify a single, coherent account of the Republicans’ Obamacare alternative from its authors and promoters. Depending upon whom you ask, the American Health Care Act would increase coverage, reduce coverage, or not affect coverage much at all; either the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the bill’s effect on insurance rates and the budget is not credible or highly promising.

But every supporter of Trumpcare seems to agree on one thing: That it will increase Americans’ freedom, relative to their lives under the Affordable Care Act. “People are going to do what they want to do with their lives,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Sunday.

Republican appeals to freedom are often amusingly circular; the party coopted the language of liberty long enough ago that they deploy it unthinkingly. If Republicans are for it, it must increase liberty. Under the terms of the AHCA, 14 million people will lose their insurance almost immediately, in many cases because higher premiums and lower subsidies will make health plans unaffordable. This is a weird way to define liberty.

But its Republicans strongest arguments for the AHCA, rather than their weakest ones, that reveal their conception of liberty and freedom to be exceptionally callous. Obamacare supporters now have an opportunity to reclaim those terms.

Three years ago, pretty much every Republican currently trying to enact Trumpcare was claiming vindication, based on a CBO report finding that the ACA would reduce employment by the equivalent of over two million jobs. They had at last found indisputable evidence that Obamacare is a job killer.