Just an amazingly fast turn-around by the Kaiser Family Foundation on the distributional impacts of Trumpcare 1.0
Assistance would ↓ for lower-income and ↑ for some higher-income people under the House Republican #ACA replacement #AmericanHealthCareAct pic.twitter.com/3q9Eds5ALF
— Cynthia Cox (@cynthiaccox) March 7, 2017
This neglects tax and Medicaid impact and only looks at Exchange. But it is illustrative of the priorities that the Republican Party embraces.
Yarrow
Great link, Richard. Thanks.
Also, when you’re calling your Reps today about this abomination of a health insurance bill, they might not know how many people in their district have coverage under the ACA. This list from Indivisible lists how many people in each district. have coverage under the ACA. You can be armed with information!
rikyrah
keep on bringing it Mayhew. People need to be told as much as possible, considering they are gonna try and ram this shytshow through as fast as possible.
hovercraft
I’ll call, but all my reps are on the right side, but it never hurts to give them ammo.
Thanks for the info Richard, the media better be all over this, rub the economically anxious peoples faces in this.
rikyrah
@Yarrow:
thanks for the link. will pass it on.
D58826
Makes sense – it helps the ‘right’ kind of people and the ‘wrong’ kind can just die off faster(a feature not a bug).
Yarrow
Richard, I have a question that I asked last night but would be interested in your take. I know there’s a 30% penalty if you haven’t had coverage for a couple of months. Say you get a job with a big company that offers health insurance as a benefit. Do you have to pay that penalty via your employer? Does your employer pay it somehow? Or it is only for people who buy health insurance on the individual market?
amk
Aren’t the 75k group the economically anxious ones that voted overwhelmingly for twitler?
pk
According to Chaffetz Americans should make a choice by not buying expensive iphones and instead spend money on health insurance (I paraphrase). Do these guys honestly not know what the cost of health care is? One iphone would not even pay my one month’s premium for health care. what is wrong with these people?
Tom Levenson
Hey David: Any read yet (or to come) on impact on rural and or relatively isolated hospitals/HC access? Given the gnashing of teeth in medicaid expansion-less states on the push to bankruptcy for such facilities, I’d guess that a lot of Trump voters are about to see their physical access to a hospital get worse, were this all to go through. Am I on the right track?
Iowa Old Lady
Cruelty really is its own reward for these people. They get a charge out of it.
chopper
@pk:
goes to show how little this turd knows about how much both phones and healthcare cost.
sigaba
Call your Republican reps and insist that they read the bill before taking any votes on it. Ask their staff if they’ve read the bill. Demand that they wait for the CBO scoring (or maybe not, since knowing the CBO exists would clearly tag you as a Dem.)
Corday
Thank you. I’m in NW Pa, my county is orange down to the $20K income level. Subsidies only get small for low-income 60 year olds. What’s the catch? Are we in a low premium area? (This is only Exchange of course. Many more people here on Medicaid. Those cuts will have a major impact.) Thinking about how to attack our Rep on this.
This pattern looks similar across the PA, OH, MI: GOP buying off comfortable Trump-supporters?
chopper
I’m going to dive into the horrid details today but first I’m a bask in the knowledge that the GOP has basically rolled over on the idea of the gubbermint’s involvement in access to health insurance. the teabaggers must be livid.
JMG
Over at Vox, Ezra Klein asks why if Republicans want a big tax cut for the rich, why don’t they just pass that instead of taking away health insurance from people. He’s so naive. Maybe under Reagan tax cuts for the rich were the idea. Now they’re just a pass along to contributors. The real GOP goal, the one that pleases their base, is inflicting suffering on the weak. Joy in the pain of others is the idea. This is why I have some trouble being too sympathetic to the many Trump voters this plan will screw over.
Ned F.
@amk:
Where I reside, the upper incomes that will benefit are the average Republican/Trump supporter, and this will make them all very happy and what they voted for. The biggest complaint I heard last year was that everyone’s premiums went up because the losers got too much.
chopper
@hovercraft:
i’m planning on calling deep red gooper congresscritters instead and promising them a teabagger primary if they vote for ‘obamacare lite’. never hurts to try to split the gop caucus.
sigaba
@JMG: “If there’s going to be suffering in the world, the role of governemnt is to make sure the suffering falls on the people who Deserve It. It’s a good thing. Being poor is dispositive evidence you deserve to suffer.”
chopper
@JMG:
because tax cuts are no fun if you don’t get to watch the have nots suffer. without the latter the former feels just…empty.
tobie
Just called my Republican Rep’s local office. I asked several times why the House could risk voting on a bill with major budget impacts that the CBO had not yet scored. The only answer I got was that the Representative had no position on that yet.
sigaba
@tobie: He’ll take a position after he passes it.
ElegantFowl
All these analyses are highly favorable to the proposed changes. You have to include the tax cut on passive income, and you have to factor in increased costs at least due to increased premiums on the old (5x instead of 3x).
The tax cut for the idle rich is a huge ignored factor in the policy and political discussion. It looks like it was a mistake to tax only income >$200k because most people don’t even know it exists even though they’re adamantly in favor of it.
hovercraft
@pk:
The thinking is that if you are getting any government subsidy, you cannot have nice things, like an i-phone, a fridge, flat screen tv, nice counter tops, you get the picture. Did I say any government subsidy, I meant except, farm subsidies, corporate welfare, in the form of tax cuts, incentives and the types of write offs that allow real estates developers to not pay taxes, capital gains, and you know the subsidies that go to the deserving.
Jeffro
@JMG:
– George Orwell, 1984 (of course)
chopper
BTW, big thanks to david for being here. as soon as this was dropped yesterday i was glad you were here to help us all decipher this piece of garbage.
Timurid
This bill is completely unhinged and divorced from any idea of consequences.
Bot the President and the GOP caucus are behaving as if 2016 was the last election.
Fair Economist
Looks like basically anybody over 50 who gets subsidies would take a cut under the Republican plan. Given who contacts their representatives, this plan is a bust.
hovercraft
@Jeffro:
It’s like they took all the terrible portrayals of a dystopian future and rolled them into one, the “modern” GOP is a mash up of 1984, Idiocracy, Lord of The Flies, with a little Mein Kampf throw in, with some Hunger Games sprinkled on top.
Ruckus
@chopper:
this piece of garbage
This doesn’t rise to the level of garbage. It is pure rotting shit. Please don’t give it any help by not calling it what it is.
Barbara
@Yarrow: No. My understanding is that the penalty only applies to the coverage that is being subsidized via tax credits. So, basically, if you are looking for a job you might decide not to purchase replacement coverage with the idea that you will within a few more months have employer coverage.
chopper
@Ruckus:
a thousand pardons as I’ve only called it “shit” four times today. how shall I flay myself?
lgerard
This is a big deal. I work with many Medicaid recipients and you would be surprised at how often they are deemed ‘ineligible, if only for a short time, due to missing paperwork or tiny temporary income increases. They are almost always reinstated retroactively, but it appears many would lose that opportunity with ryandontcare.
Barbara
@Fair Economist: My brother would be a big loser. It’s hard to visualize because costs vary so dramatically across the country and it shows cut offs not sliding income scale, but if you make less than 75K and are around 60 years old you are a huge loser. Likewise, anyone who makes less than $30,000 is a loser no matter what their age. The in between categories vary more by age and income depending on where you live.
lgerard
Oh good
Brian Killmeade just reminded him about this panacea
WereBear
@hovercraft: You left out The Sheep Look Up.
Freaked me out when I was a teen. Now, I’m living it.
WereBear
Oh, great, making us all Kentucky?
Cannot wait. Cannot. Wait.
D58826
@Timurid:
Maybe it is and they just haven’t told us. On the other hand the GOP never pays an electoral price no matter how badly they behave or their policies are. Just as the folks in Kansas.
hovercraft
@WereBear:
I’m not familiar with this one, but it doesn’t sound like anything I’d like to read, reality has me freaked out enough.
hovercraft
@WereBear:
That would be a fun scenario, blue states suing the Federal Government for violating their 10th Amendment rights to regulate the health insurance market within their states. I’d add that it would be interesting to see where Alito, Roberts and Thomas would come down, considering their affinity for “States Rights” and all, but we know they have absolutely no compunction about throwing out their “principles” to achieve conservative political goals.
David Anderson
@Yarrow: only on individual market
David Anderson
@Yarrow: only on individual market@Corday: UPMC has dirt cheap premiums for their Select and Partners network
Keith P.
I’m starting to see conservatives demanding the employer-provided insurance market replaced by purely private insurance. When did that become a thing? From my perspective, it’s one of the nicest things about the pre-ACA market in that it set up groups that allowed for benefits like, if the company/group is large enough, coverage for pre-existing conditions (usually without any kind of probationary period without continuing coverage). The groups had some negotiating power, so is it an attempt to get more money to the insurance companies?
pluky
@hovercraft: the second of John Brunner’s great dystopian triptych (Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider are the other two). Great reads! Stand won Nebula and Hugo for best novel iirc.
hovercraft
@Keith P.:
The stoopid, it burns. It’s the fact that you as an individual are being deprived of the opportunity to go out on the open market and be gouged and or excluded to your hearts content. Employers have leverage because they are bringing a larger group, so I can see where the insurance companies would love to see them taken out of the equation. but this is just more stupidity based on principles that have no basis in reality.
catclub
@Keith P.:
The same people want to change Medicare into a voucher program. Just what we need as dementia and mental impairments commence – figuring out which healthcare plan in 4 pt type is the right one for you.
ruckus
@chopper:
LOL, I think that was more than sufficient.
Patricia Brock
@pk: Because they all get FREE Healthcare benefits. They have no clue how the rest of us live from day to day.