Posted on 03/03/2017 8:09:14 AM PST by GIdget2004
Republicans are considering excluding the wealthy from new tax credits under their ObamaCare replacement plan, according to documents obtained by Politico.
The documents are dated Feb. 24, so they are not the latest version of the Republican plan, but they provide an update on a previous leaked bill from Feb. 10.
The bill remains largely the same as a previous version. It still includes tax credits to help people buy insurance, a central element of the plan, but one that has come under fire from House conservatives who worry it is a "new entitlement."
Those tax credits are based on a person's age, not their income, which Democrats argue fails to give enough help to low-income people.
The possible change being considered by Republican would be to cut off those tax credits so that higher-income people would not receive them. That proposal could help bring down the cost of the bill.
The plan still includes a proposal to phase out ObamaCare's expansion of Medicaid, another controversial element that has split Republicans, given that some want to protect the expansion.
The proposal also still includes the controversial idea of taxing more generous employer-sponsored health insurance plans, which are now tax-exempt.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Tax credits and income tests - Leftist style social-engineering that is acceptable to RINOs
No, everyone gets a credit. Who gets to define “rich?” Today’s poor might be tomorrow’s rich.
Of COURSE they don’t care, they get everything paid for. In reality they ARE rich. Losers.
How is a tax credit an “entitlement”? It is a reduction of a confiscation.
Don’t confiscate so much, and make do with the lessened revenue.
And why is income taxed anyway? The very concept invites evasion, or at least misrepresentation of what is “income”.
It’s all just deck chairs on the Titanic.
Correct. Excluding the rich would merely be a symbolic political pandering.
Also, think about what the rich will do with those tax credits. They will expand businesses, hire people, but expensive stuff - IOW - stimulate the economy.
Everything that the government gets their hands into turns to crap. They should just pull out of this altogether and not try to install some other socialist POS plan in place. No one needs to have health insurance. Insurance is meant to protect assets. If you are young and healthy and have no assets there is no reason to carry health insurance. It is stupid.
People in this country have not been refused life saving medical care because of inability to pay. I know, responding to people who called 911 for transport to the hospital is who I responded to for 25 years. The majority in the big city where I worked didn’t have assets and had no intention of paying for anything ever. That is largely because people who have assets who get a boo boo on the end of their little finger, or an itch in their ding ding drive themselves to the doctors office or hospital and do not call 911.
Doncha love how they try to make this sound so reasonable, but in reality, they are just setting their foot in the door. The burden never decreases, and they are hoping this will be an easier path to single payer.
Yeah, it’ll be defined as whatever I make at my semi-retirement job. I have a feeling people age 55-64 gonna get screwed over by both parties here.
A single person making $50k is rich according to Congress. That is when the current Obamacare subsidy ends. It ends under $50
This is nothing but political grandstanding.
Factoid:
A rich man in the US on average will live over 15 years longer than a poor man. An exploration of why this is so has failed to attribute the difference to things like stress.
A conservative perspective is that the rich should be able to experience more luxurious vacations and a more luxurious lifestyle than the poor.
A conservative perspective likely does NOT extend that style of living to snuffing out the life of someone 15 years early because he is poor. Something properly should be done to address the gap, and healthcare would be a mechanism.
So a conservative perspective of “Let them buy their own damn healthcare and keep government out of it” runs afoul that uncomfortable reality.
It's an entitlement because you get it regardless of whether you pay taxes or not. Your taxable income could be zero and you would still get the check.
...and make do with the lessened revenue.
Like that's ever going to happen.
I may be stepping on Freeper toes, but my opinion is that the so-called “Cadillac Plans” are one of the driving forces in high costs of insurance and health care.
It is a complicated story of how a good idea finally became too big. Employees with tax free benefits didn’t ever really notice how much they were spending on health insurance. The more inclusive and expensive the plan, the less the co-pay (or none, sometimes) so even the use of the plans were painless. Give something away, says Milton Freidman and you can give a WHOLE lot of it away.
Eliminating the tax free harbor for these plans would cause a lot of employees to suddenly shop for different more reasonably costs plans, as well as make them consider the costs at the counter.
Just my opinion.
Oldplayer
No. The law should be the same for everyone, not phased out based on income. Redistribution of wealth is an act of pure evil, certainly not a proper role for government.
THAT’S what they mean by “replace”???
Does the liberal perspective of "the productive owe me a portion of the fruit of their labor" make sense to you? Is there a difference in principal between the forced slavery of 1860 and the tax slavery of 2017? I think that the only difference is that in 1860, the slaves had no choice. In 2017, Atlas can still shrug.
The mistake I see is that people are under the false belief that the rich are a closed group which nobody can enter. This is far from being true, though the oligarchy would like to create just that situation. The left projects that image, of course, because the left relies on a submissive mass of deadbeats that live off the taxpayer and vote democrat.
Heck, a married couple is rich, too. Just over $50,000 and the credits get lopped off. We cannot win, especially on a fixed income.
Taxes are killing us.
Add a means test to anything, and you are also adding a perversive incentive to appear less wealthy in regard to how the test is implemented.
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