You knew that the Republican health care bill, which leaked out today, was going to be bad when the Wall Street Journal scrubbed an article critical of it from their website. (There’s still a screen cap of the story floating out there.)

Seeing the actual draft bill does not improve matters for the GOP. As the scrubbed WSJ story notes, the bill would not deny insurers from discriminating from patients on the basis of a pre-existing condition, nor would it end the practice of rescission, where insurers can drop coverage after a customer submits a claim. On the first point, lots of Republicans have long supported ending pre-existing conditions and insurer discrimination.

Even deeply conservative figures like Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okl) insisted as recently as August that “everyone agrees” that legislation should “eliminate pre-existing conditions” as an excuse for denying coverage.

Coburn’s colleague in the Senate, John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), explained in July that after listening to people in his home state, he understood that Congress needed “to take care of things like pre-existing conditions so that that doesn’t stop them from getting insurance.”

So what does the GOP health care bill do in its place? It includes the same “market-based” tropes that George W. Bush and Republicans have pushed for years. They want to turn the health insurance industry into the credit card industry by allowing interstate purchase of insurance without the issuer having to abide by state regulations, a bonanza for the industry. They want to set medical liability limits, waving the bloody shirt of “tort reform” when it accounts for less than 1% of all medical costs. They want to cover those denied coverage through insurers almost completely through the kind of high-risk pools which have proven a failure in the states, at least for those who cannot afford them. They want to expand health savings accounts, which already exist and have done absolutely nothing to alleviate the health care crisis in America.

There are a couple unique ideas in the bill – giving billions in subsidies to states which cover more residents and lower costs, for example, or allowing dependents to stay on their parent’s coverage until age 25. But for the most part, this is a political document designed to rebut a charge that Republicans have no health care bill, not a policy document with a serious effort to fix health care in this country. As Ezra Klein said today, “This isn’t serious legislation. It’s a really long press release.” And even in that, the press release essentially protects the insurance industry.

There is one notable point in the document, however: the bill does include the Eshoo amendment that would let drugmakers maintain their patents on expensive biologics forever.

UPDATE: Health Care For America Now had a fun “translation” of the bill from GOP to English. A sample:

Controlling costs = Allowing insurance companies to continue to deny people coverage for pre-existing conditions and charge higher premiums to people for having health conditions, being older, or simply being women. Encouraging the sale of barebones insurance plans with lousy benefits and high deductibles, plans that make insurance companies the most amount of money.

Allow the sale of  insurance across state lines = Let health insurance companies set up shop in the states with the loosest regulations – exactly the same way credit card companies have – and guarantee people buying health insurance are no longer protected by their state’s laws.

Won’t end insurance industry practices that discriminate against high-risk individuals = You can still be denied coverage for insurance company-defined pre-existing conditions, and insurance companies can still drop your coverage when you get sick.

Won’t provide tax credits to help the uninsured purchase coverage = Coverage too expensive? Tough. You’re on your own.