TrumpCare: No Heart, No Spine, Just Pure Gall

The Congressional Budget Office released its official score of the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, and it’s not pretty. Here are the highlights, based on comparison to current law (ObamaCare):

• The ranks of the uninsured would swell by 22 million people by 2026; 15 million of those people would by uninsured as soon as 2018
• Insurance premiums would go up 20% in 2018 and 10% in 2019; insurance premiums would eventually become lower than those under current law, due to a combination of fewer essential health benefits services, higher co-pays, and higher deductibles
• A $772 billion reduction in Medicaid spending
• A benchmark insurance plan would only cover 58% of the total cost of covered benefits starting in 2020, a drop from the current law’s actuarial value of 70%
• Using the benchmark plan, the deductible would become “a significantly higher percentage of income…making such a plan unattractive…[and] few low-income people would purchase any plan.” In effect, despite lower premiums, the higher deductible and co-pays will price the poor and the elderly out of the market

Despite all that bad news, this is what Trump had to say about the bill, thus earning the right to have this piece of reverse Robin Hood legislation named in his honor:

If the bill was so special, why does Trump feel the need to spew alternative facts about ObamaCare? And why is he sullying the official White House Twitter account when he usually does all his hack jobs from his unofficial account?

This is clear political spin. The 10.3 million figure Trump cites is only those people who have enrolled in health insurance through the official exchanges. It does not count those who:

• are covered until age 26 (average estimate = +4.2 million)
• benefited from Medicaid expansion (average estimate = +9.6 million)

And what total do you get from 10.3 + 4.2 + 9.6? 24.1 million or within spitting distance of the CBO’s estimate before ObamaCare became law.

There is still time for the Senate to do the right thing: stop this bill! Show some heart and make the bill more inclusive. Show some spine and stand up to the special interests that made you decide to steal from the poor to give to the rich. That’s the other part to which I have now alluded twice. This bill guts protections from the poor and elderly, in part, by giving at least a $230 billion tax cut to the rich. How? The bulk of that tax cut — $172 billion — is due to rescinding a 3.8% surtax on income from investments. It applies to investment income of married couples with more than $250,000 of adjusted gross income, and single filers with more than $200,000 of adjusted gross income. The other $58 billion comes from a repeal of a Medicare tax increase, an additional 0.9% tax on incomes at the same level as those listed above for the investment tax.

That’s $230 billion over 10 years going back into the wallets of America’s richest families. What can we do with $23 billion per year? BuzzFeed asked the same basic question when pondering what to do with the money Trump wants to spend on the wall. All the possibilities sound great, especially the ones that seek to “end all homelessness in the USA annually” or “provide clean drinking water to the ENTIRE planet for three years.”

Which option would you choose? Further enrich the rich or protect the most vulnerable elements of American society? In fact, the choice is really all of ours. We need to exercise it by calling or writing our senators today.