Republicans are hoping to push through a new version of their “repeal and replace” legislation, and this time they’re hoping to sweeten the deal by including a massive giveaway to lawmakers in the form of a tax cut. Even though the bill cuts special education funding, defunds Planned Parenthood, and cuts Medicaid by 25%, I’m sure these lawmakers will follow their selfish instincts on this one. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
As Republicans in Washington, D.C. prepared a vote on Trumpcare 3.0, the real third attempt that they’ve had to repeal and replace Obamacare in the last six years and five months, a provision of this bill was recently exposed by the International Business Times that showed that it would actually financially benefit many Republicans throughout this country by repealing a net investment tax of 3.8% that the Affordable Care Act put on people who earn more than $200,000 a year. As it turns out, this particular tax though it applied to about 3% of tax filers in the United States actually generated billions of dollars that helped to pay for the Affordable Care Act and subsidized healthcare for those who cannot afford it. By repealing this particular tax, which the Republican legislation does, it will provide a massive tax cut sometimes in the form of millions of dollars for many Republican politicians, again, not just in Washington, D.C., but all over the country.
At the same time that Republicans are giving themselves a huge tax cut by taking away healthcare from millions of people, we’re also seeing in this legislation a 25% reduction in funding for Medicaid services all throughout the United States. Now, one of the things that this Medicaid reduction will do is school systems all over this country to have to cut back on special education programs and caregiving. Meaning, that if you have a special needs child, even something as slight as autism on the low end of the spectrum, the schools in your area could have to cut their funding, cut their teaching staff because they’re not going to be able to afford it because those programs are paid for through Medicaid.
Furthermore, this particular bill has yet to be any Congressional Budget Office analysis of it, so we don’t even know what kind of financial impact it’s going to have on the budget, on the country, essentially on anything. Something that just a few years ago in 2009 Paul Ryan said, “You should never bring a piece of legislation to a vote if there’s no CBO analysis and if members of Congress have not read it yet,” which happens to be the case with this particular piece of legislation.
Again, what we know about this legislation lacking any kind of professional congressional analysis of it is that close to 10 million people will lose their ability to afford health insurance coverage. People with preexisting conditions are going to be priced out of the system and have no government assistance to back them up to be able to pay for the increase in premiums. Premiums for everyone else may fall initially but then they will rise back up to current levels within two years, and we’re going to cut money from Medicaid. We’re going to de-fund Planned Parenthood and we’re going to give a huge tax break to the wealthy elite and Republican politicians from coast to coast in the United States. That’s why your healthcare might be going away because Republicans want to give themselves and they want to give their wealthy donors a tax break. At the end of the day, that’s all this repeal and replace has ever been about. It’s about giving the wealthy more money and making the less fortunate continue to suffer.
