Soak the Poor, Feed the Rich
Trumpcare will eliminate virtually all of the taxes that Obamacare introduced to expand health care coverage, including the Medicare surcharges that only apply to high earners: 0.9% on earned income and 3.9% on investment income. That in itself is a 16% cut in taxes on investments for a class of people who make lots of money from investments. Health savings accounts will increase the tax breaks available to high-income families. The “Cadillac tax,” which would have affected people with generous health plans, will be pushed back until 2025 (in a transparent bid to improve the bill’s scoring for reconciliation purposes), with the expectation that it will be repealed at some point in the future.
.. Because Trumpcare eliminates the individual mandate, more healthy people are likely to opt out of coverage. This will increase the average actuarial cost of people buying individual plans, which will push up premiums—a transfer from sick people to healthy people.
.. Trumpcare achieves the long-held conservative dream of converting Medicaid into a block grant program, which means that Republican state governments will be able to use the money in ways that are only tangentially related to providing health care for poor people. (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant money, for example, is routinely used to support abstinence programs or premarital counseling services aimed at getting couples to marry.)
.. People will need the same amount of health care no matter what Congress does. If the government pays less for health care, poor people will have to pay more. If they can afford it, Trumpcare is effectively the same as a tax on the poor. If they can’t afford it, it’s even worse. This is as naked an example of class warfare as you’ll see today.