Obamacare Repeal: Follow the Money

Michael HiltzikPeople wondering why Republicans are so hell-bent on repealing Obamacare even though that would cost 20 million Americans their health insurance haven’t been heeding the old investigator’s maxim to “follow the money.”

The path leads to the Affordable Care Act’s tax provisions, and the discovery that repeal would provide the wealthiest taxpayers with an immediate tax cut totaling $346 billion over 10 years. Every cent of that would go to taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples). As Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan observed a few days after the election, the imperative of handing their wealthy patrons a gift of this magnitude may well outweigh their solicitude for the mostly middle- and low-income constituents whose individual insurance plans would be at risk from repeal.

“However ambivalent Republicans may be about health reform,” he wrote, “they are not at all ambivalent about big tax cuts to the wealthy.”

–Michael Hiltzik
The Real Reason the GOP Is Gung-Ho on Repealing Obamacare

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