When lawmakers and pundits debate policy, they are invariably talking about people’s lives. Every policy enacted by the federal government has an impact, large and small, for better or worse, on citizens and their quality of life, and entails some cost. These decisions are far from easy, and in certain areas of policy—war or health care or the environment—they can be life-and-death decisions. The duty of the lawmaker in these instances is to wrestle with the ultimate cost, and judge whether it is worth a policy that presumably will save or make better even more lives. This is how lawmaking works in a big country with many competing interests.

But in the debate over the Senate’s health care bill, Republicans and their allies have sought to shut down this fundamental aspect of the policy debate. This approach has since crept into the way the media is approaching the issue, as if it is an abstract affair—a game—with no real-world consequences for voters. Worse, it has been suggested that the very insistence on considering these consequences is an example of blind partisanship.

The Republican leadership in the Senate has literally shut down debate on the bill, but its conservative allies in the world of health care policy have tried to muzzle it in other ways. This was perfectly encapsulated in a tweet by Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a very official-sounding think tank that popped up in 2016 seemingly just to orchestrate a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. (When asked whether he advised the GOP on its health care bill, Roy declined to clarify.)

I’m very open to thoughtful critiques of the Senate bill from the left. “MILLIONS WILL DIE” is not it. — Avik Roy (@Avik) June 23, 2017

Roy is suggesting that the claim that people will die is either false or unserious. On the former point, Roy has been joined by the sociologist Charles Murray, who seemed to argue that it is impossible to make empirical life-or-death claims about policy.

Show me the data on lives saved by Obamacare, please. — Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) June 25, 2017

But of course people will die under the Republican health care bill. The CBO score for the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act shows that 22 million people will be kicked off their insurance over the next 10 years, 15 million starting next year. Premiums for older people would skyrocket and become unaffordable for many people. And when people lose health insurance, their health suffers, which, inevitably, leads to some deaths. (Contra Murray, there are also ways to measure whether policy has saved lives.)