Their suspicions have yet to be confirmed by the CBO, because the Cruz amendment was left out of its most recent score of the BCRA. Although the amendment was submitted for a score last week, the agency needs more time to evaluate it, thanks to both the substantial changes it’d make to the way exchanges work, and the sophisticated simulations those changes would entail. But Senate Republicans—facing defections from both moderates and conservatives in the conference—might not have that kind of time.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, the HHS’s draft models of the Cruz amendment reached the internet just before the latest CBO score, giving lawmakers another way to ignore its assessment. Published Wednesday by the Washington Examiner, the models paint a rather favorable picture for the package. While even HHS concedes the Cruz amendment could create separate risk pools, its analysis predicts that dynamic would actually cover more people than the current law does and would perhaps lower premiums:

These predictions have come under fire from health-policy experts for a number of reasons. First, the HHS analysis does not apply the Cruz amendment to the BCRA, but to a modified ACA, with both its tax credits and insurance mandate in place. Both of those, of course, help pay for risky patients and improve the health of the exchange markets, and would mitigate the effects of Cruz’s measure overall. Also in its evaluation, HHS “assume[s] that an adequate number of issuers offer at least one bronze, silver, and gold qualified health plan.” That assumption seems dubious given: insurers’ own warnings about the senator’s amendment, the current precariousness of exchange offerings, and the CBO’s findings that removing the mandate and reducing tax credits could leave millions of Americans living in places with no exchange offerings at all.

As Vox’s Sarah Kliff points out, the report’s premium models benefit from some rather obvious misdirection. In the chart above, the scenario under current law is presumably a weighted average of the people in exchanges, where the average age is 48 years old. But the chart uses an age-40 benchmark for predictions under the Cruz amendment. Insurance for 40-year-olds is simply cheaper than it is for 48-year-olds.

Additionally, as the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicates, the skimpy “freedom” options allowed under Cruz’s amendment would have $12,000 deductibles. It’s hard to see many Americans signing up for such a plan without there being a mandate to do so. As the most recent CBO score report states about other low-premium plans, that deductible is higher than the ACA’s out-of-pocket limits, and under it, “many people with low income would not purchase any plan even if it had very low premiums.”

The biggest problem with the preliminary report is that its methods are opaque and the assumptions that went into the charts are largely indecipherable. Experts have focused on the “proprietary elasticity estimates”—reportedly created by consulting firm McKinsey—as a special black box because all of the assumptions on how people would actually respond to insurance are wrapped up within it. But some murkiness is more fundamental: The terms on charts aren’t clearly laid out; there’s no discussion of any of the decisions authors made about future premiums under Obamacare or implications of the report’s results; and the “limitations” section, which would ordinarily describe how useful the report’s results are in the real world, doesn’t actually list any limitations.