What part of millions losing coverage doesn’t GOP get?

Now we know why House Republicans were so quick to ram through an Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill this month, without waiting for an estimate of its impact or holding any public hearings. Now we also know why the Senate plans to start from scratch.

Last week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office got around to “scoring ” the Housepassed plan, and the results are not pretty. By next year, over 14 million fewer people would have health insurance. Within a decade, 23 million fewer people would be covered.

Perhaps that bears repeating. If the House GOP health care measure were to become law, about 7% of the U.S. population would be added to the ranks of the uninsured.

Many of these people would lose coverage because the bill savages Medicaid. Others, with private coverage, would be priced out of the market because they have expensive medical conditions that insurers would no longer be required to cover. Indeed, the CBO analysis states that these less healthy people would face “extremely high premiums” in some states.

Still others would simply opt out of having insurance, wagering that they won’t get sick or be hospitalized, because the Republican plan drops the mandate that indi- viduals buy coverage.

And what is to be gained from this rollback?

Not a lot, apart from a dramatic tax cut on the investment returns of wealthy Americans. Because of the tax cuts, the GOP plan wouldn’t even save much money in the context of a $4 trillion annual federal budget. Next year, the deficit would be reduced by $4.3 billion, CBO said, and by 2026 that number would grow to $56 billion, for a 10-year cumulative savings of $119 billion.

That’s not peanuts, but it’s the kind of figure that can be attained by tweaks in existing programs. By one estimate, a slightly larger savings of $121 billion could be reached, for instance, simply by allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with drug makers.

An earlier version of the American Health Care Act, aka Trumpcare, evaluated by the CBO in March, would have bumped slightly more Americans — 24 million people — off the insurance rolls, while achieving a slightly larger deficit reduction of $337 billion.

How to explain these heartless efforts? Well, Republicans spent six years rallying their base by calling for the immediate repeal of President Obama’s signature health care law, one that was based on prior GOP efforts at health care reform and which extended coverage to more than 20 million people.

Emerging from November's elections with control of the White House and Congress, Republicans felt obligated to move forward now, acting not unlike lemmings hurling themselves over a cliff.

In normal times, the first CBO estimate would have caused those in the majority party to drop their anti- Obamacare bill. They would have moved to a strategy of working with Democrats to retain and repair, rather than repeal and replace, the health law. But, as the CBO’s latest analysis suggests, these are not normal times when it comes to sound governance.