Here’s How the Wealthy Gain From GOP Health Care Bill

What happened to the republicans concern over the deficit? They only care about it as an excuse to avoid helping the poor or anybody but the power elite.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/here-s-how-wealthy-gain-gop-health-care-bill-n778741

by Benjy Sarlin
July 1, 2017

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As frustrated GOP senators are discovering, their bill is much less generous than Obamacare because it spends hundreds of billions of dollars less on people’s health care. And the main reason it spends so much less is that its savings are used to cut taxes for wealthy Americans and for medical companies.

How close is the relationship? When it comes to Medicaid, it’s almost 1:1. The Senate bill slashes tax revenues by $701 billion over a decade, while reducing Medicaid spending by $772 billion versus current law. Overall, the Senate bill reduces federal health care spending by $1 trillion.

The result: More Americans without insurance. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would cover about 22 million fewer people by 2026 than Obamacare.

It might be easier to make this tradeoff if the Americans losing aid for health care were the ones benefiting from the tax cuts. But unless you’re paying a penalty under Obamacare's individual mandate for deciding to go without insurance, you’re unlikely to notice the difference in your return.

Instead, the biggest gains from the bill, by far, go to the top 1 percent of earners and especially the top 0.1 percent. The individual taxes the Senate would eliminate, a 3.8 percent surtax on investment income and a 0.9 percent payroll tax, only apply to single filers making over $200,000 and families making over $250,000.

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On the spending side, the bill requires people to pay higher premiums to buy a private plan similar to what's available under Obamacare. It accomplishes this by reducing spending on subsidies and distributing them in a way that encourages people to purchase higher deductible plans with lower premiums. At the same time, it eliminates Obamacare subsidies that help low-income people pay their deductibles.

Here, too, the lower end of the economic spectrum fares worse than the higher end. The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation projected premiums for people making over and under 200 percent of the federal poverty line (about $24,000 a year for an individual) and found the biggest spikes came for older low-income customers. The CBO also found this group would have the hardest time finding affordable insurance under the Senate bill.

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