The Center for Health and Economics (H&E), a nonpartisan research group that does health-care analysis, has come out with the first assessment of the Burr-Coburn-Hatch plan, the CARE Act, which is intended to replace the Affordable Care Act with a much more free-market-oriented alternative. A number of caveats are necessary: While H&E is quite trustworthy, its scoring doesn’t care quite the reliability of Congressional Budget Office scores, and the CARE Act isn’t yet legislation — it lays out a certain set of policies and plans, and H&E had to run just those changes to the health-care system through their model.

But the results are very interesting: For one, it accomplishes what a feasible conservative replacement for Obamacare should do. It maintains similar levels of health-insurance coverage, cuts premiums, encourages medical innovation, and moves Americans away from an employer-based system of health insurance to one where more of them buy their own coverage. (Obamacare, in large part because it generously subsidizes individually purchased coverage, does that, too — but this does more of it.) In fact, it actually slightly increases health insurance coverage, by 1 percent of those who will be covered under current law (meaning about 2.5 million people). More important, it does so by significantly cutting Medicaid rolls and moving people into private insurance. Their score assumes that the CARE Act isn’t enacted until 2017, and following is its effects:

You’ll notice that it predicts a lot more Americans will enroll in narrow-network individual market plans: That’s in part because that’s what people do on the individual market when their insurance isn’t massively subsidized by their employer and other taxpayers, but also because people transitioning from Medicaid will be buying cheap plans. In fact, the overall effect on the health-care system won’t be narrower networks, because so many Americans will be freed from America’s health-care Kibera, Medicaid, and given money to purchase plans they want.

So what would this cost? Well, because subsidizing people’s purchase of catastrophic health insurance is much cheaper than having the government run it, and because the CARE Act replaces Obamacare’s subsidies with ones that don’t benefit the middle class, it will cut spending, H&E determines, substantially:

H&E shrinks Medicaid via a form of block-granting that involves allocating a certain amount of money to states based on their number of Medicaid enrollees, rather than regular block grants, which more or less just sends states a set amount of money to run the program (both approaches give them more flexibility in how to then spend it). The latter is what Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget has done, and it yields much more substantial savings, especially in his most aggressive budget, the 2013 one that balances in ten years: The CARE Act would cut Medicaid spending by $193 billion in the seven years H&E scored, while the Ryan budget would cut the program by $770 billion over ten years.

There is more to the H&E score that’s appealing, and some of it that’s perplexing and possibly unappealing (but not that invalidates the conclusions above). I’ll have more on it soon.