Which brings us to the House Republicans’ plan.

This monstrosity manages to be more cowardly and cruel than anything it replaces. It repackages direct subsidies as tax credits. It lowers taxes and raises prices for the elderly. It will likely lead to millions of people losing their insurance. Some forever, but some only to expose them to the nightmare of trying to obtain it again.

And yet it also fails to make any necessary changes to the system. It does nothing to tackle absurd cost obesity in the American system. It does nothing to simplify health-care choices or markets for end users. And it can’t make these changes because it dares not offer the slightest disturbance to the upper-middle-class people whose coverage is relatively better than everyone else’s.

Lacking the courage to actually solve the health-care problem, the House GOP seems to have devised a plan to satisfy only two goals: 1. to provide a plausible end to their seven-year campaign to repeal and replace ObamaCare; 2. to manipulate the government’s fiscal projections in such a way that their future desired tax reform seems workable.