House Republicans have rallied behind the cause of people getting insurance cancellation notices—and, on Friday, they will vote on a measure that will purportedly allow these people to keep their current policies. The bill might not work as intended, but it might well have another set of consequences. It would allow insurer companies to keep discriminating against the sick, while selling people policies that leave them exposed to crippling bills in case of serious illness.

A vote for the Upton bill, in short, is a vote for everything Americans say they hate about their health care system.

The bill's official name is the “Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013.” It has just two substantive sections. The first says that insurers may continue to sell plans available on the market now, regardless of whether those plans satisfy Obamacare regulations for benefits, pricing, and availability. The second says that any policy insurers sell would satisfy the individual mandate—i.e., the requirement that everybody carry comprehensive insurance or pay a fee. By my count, the whole bill is about 235 words long. That’s including the subheads, legislative numbers, and so on.

Republicans might think such brevity is a virtue. Actually, it's a sign of how little the sponsors have thought through—or care—about its potentially far-reaching effects.

The bills' actual impact on people losing coverage is difficult to know. It would not require insurers to keep offering the old plans; having gone through the motions of cancelling the policies, carriers might decide it's not worth starting them up again. Salon's Brian Beutler (who is the exception to the rule that political reporters don't understand policy) has suggested the bill's ultimate impact might be a big pffffft, because insurers are locked into their 2014 plans and figure they can live with the new market. That's possible. But it could also be bad news—very, very bad news—for the many millions of un- and under-insured Americans who hoped to buy decent private insurance starting next year.