When conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Strain published an article last week titled, “End Obamacare, and people could die. That’s okay.” he made two critical errors: He embedded a genuinely extreme view into a banal one, and then demanded absolution for both without defending the former.

Strain’s larger point is so uncontroversial, it barely needs reprising: Obamacare was not the final word in U.S. health policy, and if Republicans want to replace the Affordable Care Act with a different, less redistributive set of reforms, they should be able to try, without necessarily catching hell for preferring a system that tolerates marginally more avoidable deaths than Obamacare does (especially if they ply fiscal savings into different programs that alleviate poverty, or improve general welfare).

This is an unobjectionable point. Had Strain argued that the Republican presidential nominee should make an Obamacare alternative the centerpiece of his 2016 platform, nobody would have called it immoral. But the premise of his article is that conservatives (including himself, presumably) will be pleased if the Supreme Court intervenes to gut Obamacare, because it would provide Republicans the missing leverage they’ll need to impose a replacement through the political branches.

First comes god from the machine, and only then comes an Obamacare replacement.

If such a dramatic predicate carried no consequences, Strain’s cost-benefit argument would stand on its own. But when you account for the damage the Supreme Court would incur in order to provide Republicans their missing leverage, it collapses completely.