And the winner is ... nobody, really.

The Congressional Budget Office says that the latest iteration of the tax-cut bill in healthcare clothing will leave 23 million people uninsured over the next decade and will reduce the deficit by $119 billion over the same stretch of time. These figures, which really suck, are only marginally different from what the CBO said about the last dead fish proposed by the House of Representatives.

What's new is that the CBO says that, by 2020, the new AHCA would destabilize the insurance markets in one-sixth of the country. It also says that premiums in waiver states would drop, but that people with pre-existing medical conditions in those states would be spending more out of their pockets. (Lifetime caps will be back, too.) And, perhaps most stunning of all, the CBO estimates that premiums for the low-income elderly could rise … wait for it … 800 percent.

Freedom!

So, after all that, according to the CBO, the Republicans can't come up with anything better than making their previous attempt infinitesimally less godawful than the previous one. It whacks the poor and the elderly infinitesimally less hard, and it makes the health-insurance system more unstable. It is also politically insane. From TheLos Angeles Times:

The budget office report further undermines claims by President Trump and House Republicans that their campaign to repeal and replace the current healthcare law, often called Obamacare - will protect all Americans' access to healthcare. The new CBO report updates an analysis the office did in March of the original version of the legislation developed by House GOP leaders. Since then, Republicans made a series of modifications tailored to win enough votes from conservative and centrist GOP lawmakers to pass the bill. It cleared the House on May 4 without any Democratic votes. But the revisions did not fundamentally change the structure of the bill or its impact, budget analysts concluded. The American Health Care Act, as it is called, cuts more than a $1 trillion from the assistance the government gives low- and moderate-income Americans, primarily through a historic retrenchment in Medicaid, the half-century-old government health plan for the poor. The bill also fundamentally restructures the system of insurance marketplaces created by Obamacare to guarantee health coverage to Americans, even if they are sick.

Who's going to run on this mess? Because Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, decided to revive his dead fish using only the most conservative members of his radical House caucus, he's stuck every Republican with the task of defending an even more recently deceased fish that still has every political and practical liability of the first one. This is because, as a political leader, Paul Ryan can't tie his shoes.

Meanwhile, wealthy Americans and the medical device and insurance industries still fare best in the House bill. They stand to benefit from $663 billion in tax cuts over the next decade as the House legislation gradually eliminates taxes that were included in the Affordable Care Act to fund the law's coverage expansion.

No kidding. I never would have guessed that would happen. I suspect that the barrooms of America are full tonight of Republican political consultants, drinking themselves senseless at the thought of running candidates behind this Trojan Horse. Good thing the president*'s out of town. This would confuse him even more.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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