In their desperation to salvage the American Health Care Act, House Republicans adopted a provision that would allow states to waive Affordable Care Act rules prohibiting insurers from price-gouging sick people and selling plans that don’t cover basic benefits like hospitalization, doctor’s visits, and maternity care.

By addressing the objections of its most conservative members, they solved a political problem within the House GOP conference but created a new political problem with the broader public, which overwhelmingly believes insurance companies shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.

House Republicans have tried to address this political problem, in turn, by lying about it outright. “People will be better off, with pre-existing conditions, under our plan,” House Speaker Paul Ryan insisted last month. President Donald Trump said these protections would be “guaranteed.”

VERIFIED: MacArthur Amendment strengthens AHCA, protects people with pre-existing conditions. https://t.co/6W7bDEO40r — Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) May 2, 2017

Republicans knew this was untrue when they passed the bill, and we know they knew it was untrue, because they hustled it to a floor vote before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had a chance to publish an analysis of its impact on health insurance coverage.



That impact analysis arrived on Wednesday. On a top-line level, it finds the effects of the updated AHCA would be broadly similar to the original draft of the legislation—14 million would lose their insurance right away and, relative to the Obamacare baseline, 23 million fewer people would be insured after 10 years. But now the CBO notes that many of those uninsured would be sick people driven out of the markets by price discrimination.