After keeping Americans waiting for seven long years, House Republicans on Monday achieved a minor miracle: they released a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare that managed to upset just about everybody besides Paul Ryan, who helped write it, and Donald Trump, who almost certainly does not understand it. Conservative Republicans are attacking the plan’s tax credits, which they worry would create a “new entitlement” program. Moderate Republicans are in a panic over the bill’s drastic cuts to Medicaid, which would leave millions of constituents without a safety net. Doctors, like Democrats, are outraged that after promising legislation to improve the health-care system, Ryan and Trump are moving forward with a plan that would likely cause millions of people to lose their coverage.

On Wednesday, the White House conceded that this was, in fact, precisely the point. Health insurance “is not really the end goal here, is it?” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, asked rhetorically in response to a question on MSNBC’s Morning Joe about how many people would be covered under the new plan. “It‘s one of the conservatives’—one of the Republicans’—complaints about the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning: it was a great way to get insurance and a lousy way to actually be able to go to the doctor.”

Mulvaney continued, arguing that “it will be possible for more people to get better care at the doctor under this plan than it was under Obamacare.” But the first part of his response belied the second: Ryan’s plan to reform the health-care system is not designed to help more people afford insurance coverage, or even to keep coverage levels stable. In fact, just the opposite. Republican lawmakers believe, at an ideological level, that redistribution of wealth is both immoral and harmful to the people it is designed to help. Increasing consumer choice and promoting personal responsibility, not subsidizing coverage, has always been the conservative end goal.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer made much the same point, in similarly coded language, during his daily press briefing. “I can’t overstate this. There is a difference between having a card and having care. Being told you have coverage and not being able to use it, is no good,” Spicer told reporters Wednesday. “When we get the question, ‘How many people are going to be covered?’ that is not the question that should be asked,” he explained. “Having coverage with a high deductible and in some cases not having a plan that allows you to get the coverage that you need or afford it, isn’t real coverage.”

The Republican argument for cutting the Obamacare subsidies, in other words, appears to be that no insurance is better than flawed insurance. Or, more generously, that expanding freedom of choice for higher-income consumers is preferable to preserving coverage for the poor.