So, let’s see: the Republican “health care” plan would cut $880 billion from health care for the poorest Americans, but only save $337 billion from the budget; it would destroy coverage for 24 million Americans and savagely cost people in their 50s and 60’s thousands of dollars a year extra in premiums, but give wealthy people and corporations $600 billion in tax cuts.
Someone please explain to me: how is this a “health care” plan? Of course, it’s not. It’s illness and death for the poor and the middle class plus a cash bonus for the wealthy.
The takeaways:
1. 24 million cut from health care means approximately 52,000 Americans would die each year who would not if the Republicans let the ACA alone. Going by the number of people kicked off their coverage over time (17 million by 2018, 21 million by 2020, and 24 million by 2026), that comes out to roughly 464,000 Americans dead over the next ten years, and more than half a million dead Americans every decade after that.
2. Poor people could see their premiums rise by as much as $13,000 a year, one reason why so many would lose coverage; those who maintain coverage would still be financially devastated, depressing their spending power and thus the economy.
3. The budget would be cut by no more than $34 billion per year, a fraction of what the deficit totals. Trump plans to hike the already bloated military budget by $54 billion. If Trump raised that by only $20 billion instead, the relative cost of the ACA would be covered.
4. Rich people get rewarded. I am not sure exactly how this fits into a health care plan. An alternative way to pay for the ACA would be to hike their taxes by only half of what Republicans want to cut from them.
This isn’t a health care plan. It’s an abattoir for the poor which profits the rich. It is a design by someone with literally no human conscience. It is, literally, malevolent.
Troy
The point of course is to undo PPACA’s main funding mechanism, which was raising taxes on people making $200,000 or more in capital gains.
Basically people in the top 5% — one out of twenty — partially pay for “the 47%”‘s health insurance premiums.
Unlike them, I’m not philosophically opposed to redistribution like this, as the top 5% are largely a bunch of parasitical rent-seekers and we should tax that as much as we can.
The GOP does have a sub-rosa slippery slope argument, in that they don’t want the majority voting themselves largesses out of the public purse.
Given that 50% of the US makes under $38,000/yr, if the poor ever got on the same page they could take everything from the not just the top 1-5% but the upper middle class too.
At any rate, it’s pretty brutal that the CBO scores $3B in savings from the bill thanks to more people dying before they are old enough to collect their SSA.