Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

When the Trump administration and the House Republican leadership saw the scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office coming for its health care bill, their instinct was to shoot the messenger. Never mind that, as Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley once said, “the CBO is like God” in Congress. Breaking Beltway norms, discrediting institutions and asserting “alternative facts” is a daily occurrence in Trump’s Washington. If the CBO needs to be trampled over to replace the Affordable Care Act with the American Health Care Act, so be it.

Perhaps House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can ignore the CBO’s conclusion of millions more uninsured—along with the similar internal White House analysis that leaked to POLITICO—and muscle the bill through Congress. Perhaps President Donald Trump will gleefully sign it and baselessly boast how it will cover millions more and lower costs for everybody.


But even if Republicans can find a way to do it, the CBO is clearly warning them: You don’t have to do it.

Trump and his fellow Republicans have repeatedly insisted that Obamacare is in a “death spiral” in which the young and healthy snub coverage, leaving behind a sicker customer base, pushing premiums higher, causing more people to snub coverage and so on. “Obamacare is collapsing … Action is not a choice, it is a necessity,” Trump warned in last month’s address to Congress. If so, it would make sense for Republicans to expend precious time and resources navigating the thorny politics of health care.

But the CBO says, relax. “The market for insurance purchased individually … would probably be stable in most areas under either current law or the legislation.” In other words, action is a choice.

And it’s a choice with potentially severe short-term political consequences. By 2018, i.e., the 2018 midterm elections, CBO projects that 14 million more people will be uninsured than if the Affordable Care Act remained. That’s about a 50 percent jump from the 27 million uninsured today.

Republicans might say to that, so what? The CBO says that number comes from people who “choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties” and from “people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums.” This is just delivering on freedom. From the libertarian perspective, if a voter chooses not to spend his or her money on unaffordable insurance, that’s a feature, not a bug. And the voters proactively making that choice won’t necessarily be upset with Republicans.

But the two words that should instill sheer terror into Republican hearts are “higher premiums.”

Ryan, instead of trashing the CBO, touted its conclusion that by 2026, premiums would be “roughly 10 percent lower than under current law." White House budget director Mick Mulvaney also paused from his anti-CBO crusade to accept the premium estimate, crediting the bill’s belief in “market competition” for the lower costs.

However, in embracing the CBO’s long-run projection, they skipped over the short run: “In 2018 and 2019 … average premiums for single policyholders in the nongroup market [for those not covered by an employer or government program] would be 15 percent to 20 percent higher than under current law.” On top of that, CBO warns that older voters, who skew Republican, could get socked in the short and long run because “insurers would be allowed to generally charge five times more for older enrollees than younger ones rather than three times more as under current law.”

Your average Republican member of Congress cares a whole lot more about the cost of coverage in 2018 than in 2026. A 20 percent price spike, combined with the 50 percent jump in the number of uninsured—leading to charges that Republicans needlessly put health insurance out of reach of many working-class Americans—would be a devastating combination right before an election.

The political risk involved is unnecessary. Not only is the current system not in a death spiral, many voters are not agitating for repeal. In a Monmouth University poll from earlier this month, only 31 percent support “repeal and replace,” with an additional 8 percent backing a simple repeal. Meanwhile, a clear majority wants to “keep” the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate, albeit with some improvements.

Blue America is not alone in its reluctance to repeal the ACA. A series of focus groups with Trump voters conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed, according to its president Drew Altman, that many “recoiled” in response to descriptions of Republican proposals, deeming them “not insurance at all.” While they weren’t thrilled with the status quo, “Some were uninsured before the Affordable Care Act and said they did not want to be uninsured again.”

Is sweeping Obamacare repeal under the rug really an option for Republicans? They’ve been obsessed with it for years, raising expectations among ideological base voters. No doubt there is risk of deflating conservative enthusiasm by surrendering. But die-hard conservatives increasingly hate the plan on the table (the right-wing Breitbart.com jumped on the CBO numbers to trash the House bill) so letting them defeat it may end up boosting base morale.

Another complication is that abandoning their ownhealth care proposal threatens Republican plans for tax reform. CBO scored the AHCA as a deficit reducer, since the cost of repealing of Obamacare’s wealth taxes would be more than offset by slashing funding for Medicaid and scrapping Obamacare’s subsidies. By shrinking the budget baseline ahead of tackling tax reform, it’s easier to make tax reform revenue-neutral, thereby qualifying it for the budget “reconciliation” process that disallows filibusters by the Senate minority.

But the flip side of the procedural puzzle is that reconciliation doesn’t allow for two separate tax and spending bills to be considered simultaneously, yet Republicans want to prevent filibusters of both health care and tax reform. So they constructed a plan for back-to-back reconciliations mere months apart: a fiscal year 2017 reconciliation for Obamacare repeal, and a Fiscal Year 2018 reconciliation for tax reform.

The schedule is precarious. As budget expert Stan Collender recently explained, the 2017 budget is supposed to be completed by June, so that 2018 can be finalized before the next fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 of this year. That doesn’t give Republicans much time to finish health care, especially considering that the significant intraparty divisions that previously existed have just been blown wide open by the CBO.

A protracted health-care debate would delay consideration of tax reform, itself an incredibly complex undertaking that has also divided the Republican Party, but far more important to the business community than repealing Obamacare. Expectations of a big windfall have arguably goosed the stock market, and failure to deliver could cause the bubble to burst.

The legislative clock could simply run out. So getting health care out of the way, and by that I mean shelving it indefinitely, would give Republicans more time to solve their tax reform conundrum.

Failing to enact health care form would be embarrassing. For Trump, it would raise questions whether he really was Mr. “Art of the Deal.” For Ryan, it would spark chatter that he did not have control over his caucus. And pundits would speculate that one legislative loss would stall momentum for the rest of the party’s agenda.

But rocky starts don’t have to sink presidencies. By July of 1993, President Bill Clinton had a lost a stimulus bill and an energy tax and settled for an awkward compromise on allowing gays to serve in the military while remaining closeted. When he finally got a big legislative win in August, it was for a tax increase that contributed to the loss of Democratic control of Congress in 1994. But at least the resulting deficit reduction gave him a victory ahead of his 1996 reelection bid.

In all of Clinton’s early defeats, he figured out how to cut bait and move on. In that respect, he differed from his ill-fated Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter, whose obsessive, uphill pursuit of energy reform sapped his political capital throughout his lone term.

Trump surely has the skills to move on from a legislative setback. Nobody can distract the public and the press like he can. A handful of tweets and the health-care debacle will be a distant memory, like Andy What’s-His-Name who will not be Secretary of Something-Or-Other.

Everything appears stacked against the Republican health-care bill. House conservatives call it “Obamacare-lite.” In the Senate, where the GOP has a razor-thin majority, several Republicans oppose undoing Obama’s Medicaid expansion. And the CBO is plainly telling party leaders that if they actually resolve those intraparty disputes, the result will be immediate pain inflicted on voters they need to keep power.

The CBO did the party a favor by giving them the cold, hard truth: Republicans are on the precipice of an enormous disaster. It’s time to walk back from the brink, while there’s still time.