It is difficult to overstate how essential the peddling of outright lies was to the House GOP’s ability to pass the morally obscene American Health Care Act last week. Much has been made of the fact that Republican leaders railroaded their members into voting for an ink-wet bill that hadn’t been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, but one of the main reasons they did so was to make it easier to lie about what the legislation would do, rather than respond to what non-partisan experts say the bill would do.

Until Thursday, this was as much about convincing reluctant members to vote yes as it was about deceiving the public. With the bill now out of the House and in the Senate’s hands, the lies only serve the latter purpose. Top Republicans fanned out on the Sunday morning news shows, and rank-and-file Republicans returned to their districts, to mislead as many people as possible about what would happen if the AHCA became law.

It is unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for Congress to consider major social legislation that no one can sell honestly to the public. But it is also unusual for Congress to pillage money that provides health insurance to the poor and hand it to rich people and large corporations. To that end, these Republicans are counting on the reporters who interview them, and the news outlets that report on AHCA, to either not grasp finer points of health policy or to feel inhibited from disputing lies, so that the lies get transmitted to the public uncorrected. And these are the four lies they’ve decided are the most central to their sales pitch.

We’re Not Kicking Millions Off Of Medicaid

HHS Secretary Tom Price says the $880B cuts to Medicaid will "absolutely not" result in millions losing coverage https://t.co/s2QDMsFjEh — CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 7, 2017

AHCA cuts Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of an earlier version of the bill found that AHCA would reduce Medicaid rolls by five million people within a year, and 14 million people over 10 years. The Medicaid provisions have not changed since the publication of that impact estimate. This is the most consequential, black-is-white lie of the four, because it violates Donald Trump’s repeated campaign promise not to cut Medicaid and because of the degree of contempt it shows for millions of poor people. And House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed it on Sunday.