Republican Party leaders are trying furiously to find 50 votes for some kind of legislation that would, one way or another, repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The big focus of their efforts are a handful of relatively moderate senators from states where Obamacare has had a particularly strong impact on coverage. And although the campaign includes some old-fashioned political pressure, with President Donald Trump set this week to visit two of those states (Ohio and West Virginia ), GOP leaders are also trying to use persuasion. In particular, they are still trying to convince those holdout senators that repealing the 2010 health care law wouldnt cause their constituents to suffer.

So far those senators have been skeptical, and for good reason. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the GOP proposals under consideration would mean between 22 to 32 million people lose health insurance, depending on the specific bill. Multiple independent experts have come to similar conclusions.

Meanwhile, a huge pile of research and data suggests that when people lose insurance, they are worse off because they end up skimping on care they need, going into debt paying for the care they get, or some combination of the two. This is particularly true for people with the lowest incomes and most serious medical problems in other words, the people who need help the most.

Not that it should require a bunch of academic researchers make these points. Each of the bills under consideration would drain more than $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid and tax credits for people who buy private insurance on their own. Obviously that is going to hurt , as anybody now depending on those programs for insurance can attest .

But apparently neither data or common sense is enough to stop Trump administration officials, Senate leaders, and their outside allies from making their case. Publicly and privately, they continue to say repeal wouldnt cause a lot of pain. And lately they have been leaning heavily on two arguments in particular:

Claim: CBO Projections Arent Reliable

Last weekend, two administration officials wrote a Washington Post op-ed dismissing the agencys predictions as little more than fake news. It was merely the latest volley in a campaign to discredit the CBO that Republicans have been waging ever since it first issued a devastating projection of what the initial legislation, in the House, would mean for insurance coverage.

These attacks typically focus on a prediction that CBO genuinely got very wrong. The agency vastly over-estimated enrollment in the Affordable Care Acts exchanges. What Republicans never acknowledge is that on the most important prediction, about the total change in the number of Americans with insurance, CBO was extremely close especially if you adjust the projection for the Supreme Courts 2012 decision giving states extra leeway to avoid expanding Medicaid.