There is no single story conservatives can tell to brush aside the fact that the House and Senate GOP health plans will throw tens of millions of people off of their health plans.

The magnitude of the coverage loss under both bills is too large to be explained away with any single tendentious argument. Conservatives have thus taken to deploying multiple, mutually contradictory arguments to dispute, or blunt the political impact of, analyses showing GOP health care legislation will add 20-plus million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured, relative to current law.

This somewhat embarrassing trend wouldn’t be necessary if more conservatives had enough faith in their own convictions to admit they believe taxation of the super wealthy to subsidize health insurance for the poor and working class is one injustice compounding another.

Instead, they offer these three justifications for not rejecting Trumpcare out of hand.

The Congressional Budget Office is wrong.

There are weak and strong versions of this argument, the former of which takes issue with the CBO’s track record, the latter of which takes issue with its methods. The former, favored by Trump administration officials, is more easily digestible, but more obviously deceptive. The latter, favored by conservative writers, has at least some merit, but nowhere near enough to sand the rough edges off of Trumpcare.