THE Obamacare replacement that the House sent to the Senate might as well have had a note scrawled across its pages: Save us from ourselves.

And the Senate bill, which just emerged from Mitch McConnell’s underground laboratories into the light of day, does indeed improve upon the House’s bill in several important ways. But is that enough to make the new version an electoral winner for Republicans? Probably not: At best one might say that it’s a political suicide attempt that’s somewhat less likely to succeed. Is it enough to make it sound public policy? Again, I think not: There are good ideas worked in, but still too much needless callousness.

The best argument for the bill is twofold. First, it officially reconciles the Republican Party to the idea that the government should provide support for working-class health insurance — a necessary and overdue reconciliation. Second, it takes part of Obamacare’s basic structure — tax credits, pegged to income, to enable the lower-middle class and near poor to afford coverage — and uses it to further two of the more compelling conservative health policy objectives: higher-deductible plans (which tend to reduce health care cost inflation) rather than comprehensive ones (which exacerbate it), and subsidies for private insurance rather than Medicaid for the near-poor, because private coverage may deliver better health.

So far, so reasonable. Also reasonable: a loosening of age-based price controls to make the exchanges more viable, and the fact that the Senate’s bill’s income-based credits are less stingy than the House bill’s flat credit, and thus less likely to leave the poor and old with impossible premiums to pay.