1. Trumpcare will reduce premiums

The American Health Care Act lowers premiums, stabilizes the market, and gives people more choice and freedom. https://t.co/Ohx3SMsEtK pic.twitter.com/di1ZSUyJf2 — Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) March 13, 2017

This is the most insidious of falsehoods, because explaining why it’s false isn’t easy. After all, even CBO says, “The legislation would tend to increase average premiums in the nongroup market prior to 2020 and lower average premiums thereafter.” But the CBO’s method of tabulating average premiums only accounts for those who actually buy insurance (not for the average price of premiums on offer) and thus obscures the fact that the “lower premiums” Ryan boasts of stem from the fact that his plan makes insurance unaffordable for the elderly and drives them out of the market altogether.

To see how deceptive this is, consider the following analogy to cars. Imagine America elected an erratic, impulsive person to the presidency, and he was so racist toward Muslims and Latinos that Arab and Latin-American oil exporters decided to impose an embargo against the United States, creating an oil shock. As gasoline prices climbed, the cost of owning and using a car would climb too, inducing some people to trade in their cars for smaller, more fuel efficient ones, or to buy smaller cars than they intended when they entered the market. SUV aficionados might wait until the oil crisis passed altogether to buy their gas-guzzlers. Consumer data would subsequently show the average price of automobiles sold in America falling. But surely nobody in the press corps would take the president seriously if he boasted about such an embarrassing fiasco by claiming he had “lowered car prices.” We would call that person a liar.

This is almost exactly what Paul Ryan is doing, though. Just as “lowering car prices” conveys reducing the average car price within the entire fleet, lowering premiums suggests reducing the amount of money insurers charge on average per available plan. As much as Ryan and nearly every other Republican is pretending otherwise, that’s not what CBO if saying will happen. CBO says average premiums will fall in large part because, “the mix of people enrolled in coverage obtained in the nongroup market is anticipated to be younger, on average, than the mix under current law.” They’re looking at the average price of plans sold.

What Trumpcare does is increase premiums for elderly people so much that many of them will not buy plans at all, lowering the average price of policies purchased on the market. A price shock, but for premiums, instead of oil. This is an extremely cynical and dishonest way of bragging about subjecting millions of seniors to the risks of going uninsured, and Ryan does it constantly.