Now that the Republican Party has beclowned itself on health care, now that Obamacare repeal lies in rubble, now that every G.O.P. policy person who ever championed a replacement plan is out wandering in sackcloth and ashes, wailing, “The liberals were right about my party, the liberals were right about my party,” beneath a harsh uncaring heaven … now, in these hours of right-wing self-abnegation, it’s worth raising once again the most counterintuitive and frequently scoffed-at point that conservatives have made about Obamacare:

It probably isn’t saving many lives.

One of the most powerful arguments in the litany that turned moderate Republican lawmakers to jelly was that they were voting to “make America sick again,” to effectively kill people who relied on the Affordable Care Act for drugs and surgery and treatment. Tens of thousands of people, Democrats warned, would die if Paul Ryan’s stingy replacement took its place.

We will not get to test the proposition, and nor should we wish to do so, since the replacement plan was such a botch. But this argument was still most likely false. Maybe Obamacare is a huge lifesaver, but so far the evidence is conspicuously missing.

The link between health insurance and actual health has always been a lot murkier than most champions of universal coverage admit, with studies going back decades that show little evidence that giving people insurance actually makes them healthier. Recent data relevant to the current era of reform is mixed: A study of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts insurance expansion showed health benefits for the newly insured (most of whom got private insurance), but a study of Oregon’s pre-Obamacare Medicaid expansion found that the recipients’ physical health did not improve.

Writing in National Review during the brief repeal “debate,” Oren Cass argued that since most of Obamacare’s insurance expansion was accomplished through Medicaid, one would expect the new health care law’s impact on health to be closer to what happened in Oregon than in Massachusetts. And indeed, despite confident liberal expectations about how many lives Obamacare would save each year, the only noticeable recent shift in the American mortality trend has gone in the opposite direction — upward, likely thanks to the opioid epidemic.