Republicans: Enrage your colleagues - By E.J. Dionne Jr.
November 15 at 7:44 PM
The GOP bill that should be called the Cut Taxes on President Trump and Other Very Rich People Act of 2017 always had a secondary purpose: to jack up the deficit so Republicans could later cry out in horror, “Look at that awful debt!” They would then use the pools of red ink they created to justify deep cuts in social programs.
But people who call themselves conservative are shoveling out so much money so fast to corporations and the privileged that they needed some health-care cuts upfront — at the expense of coverage for millions of our less fortunate brothers and sisters. And so on Tuesday, the Senate majority took an appalling bill and made it even more atrocious. To their ungainly concoction of tax breaks for the various interests that support them, they added the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, scrapping the mandate would reduce the number of Americans with health insurance by 13 million over a decade. To which the champions of redistributing money to the boardrooms and the yacht clubs say: Oh, goody!
This cutback in coverage would save the government $318 billion. The Republicans would use this money to pay part of the cost of making their corporate giveaways permanent, thus getting around budget rules. They also nudged up temporary personal income tax rate cuts and increased the child tax credit. The idea is to disguise just how much this bill tilts toward the wealthy.
It gets worse: The CBO says that ending the individual mandate would raise health insurance premiums by 10 percent — another way regular folks are being asked to cough up cash because of this bonanza for the well-heeled.
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