Trump's Big CON: It's Not a Health Care Plan, It's a 'Yuge' Tax Cut for the Wealthy

UPDATE III:  "[S]urprised the GOP crashed and burned."

You should be.

Read the Washington Post, 20 reasons the GOP crashed and burned on health care, which lists as one of the reasons: "You cannot pass major legislation with a policy-illiterate president who cannot explain what’s in it and therefore cannot persuade voters and lawmakers of its merits."

UPDATE II:  Read also the Washington Post, ‘Repeal and replace’ was once a unifier for the GOP. Now it’s an albatross.

And next election, after millions have lost their health care, remember the many lies Trump and the Republi-CONs made about health care before, during and since the election, then Trump complained that: "nobody knew that health care could be so complicated".

UPDATE:  "The Senate's health-care bill might be too much for even Marie Antoinette.

After all, about the only way it could be more regressive is if it took the cake a certain French queen wanted the poor to eat for dinner and gave it to the rich for dessert. Or, say, cut Medicaid and middle-class health insurance subsidies so much that 22 million fewer people have health insurance -- all so that the government could afford to cut the capital gains tax for households making $250,000 or more.

Oh, wait. That last one is actually what the Senate bill would do. . .

It's really pretty simple. The Senate bill would, over the course of the next decade, cut Obamacare's health insurance subsidies by $408 billion and Medicaid by $772 billion all to pay for $700 billion of tax cuts, nearly half of which the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says would go to the top 1 percent of households. Not only that, but the fact that it would only peg the value of its remaining subsidies to higher-deductible plans means that a lot of people would be pushed into them. They couldn't afford anything else. On an apples-to-apples basis, the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the Senate bill would increase the cost of a "silver" plan that covers 70 percent of expected medical costs by an average of 74 percent over the next three years—and more for the type of older, poorer people who overwhelmingly went for Trump.

Although it's actually even worse than that. A 64 year-old making $26,500 would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, see their premiums for a silver plan go from $1,700 under Obamacare to $6,500 under the Senate bill—but it'd be for a silver plan that covered 17 percent fewer of their expected medical expenses. So they'd be paying more to get less. How much more? Well, the Kaiser Family Foundation calculates that, in the case of our hypothetical 64 year-old, their deductible would go from $809 to $6,105. And it'd be an even bigger jump for people a little bit lower on the income ladder. Someone making just $18,090 would see their deductibles increase from $255 to the same $6,105. The Senate bill, then, would leave a lot of people with a choice between plans they couldn't afford to buy and couldn't afford to use.

Or, as the Republicans would call it, freedom! And if you lived in a red state, you would probably get more of it. That's because the Senate bill would let them opt out of so-called "essential health benefits" like mental health, maternity care, and prescription drugs—and in the process, the Brookings Institution's Matthew Fiedler points out, bring back annual and lifetime limits on benefits. The result would be a system where healthy people would mostly buy cheaper plans that didn't cover much, and mostly sick people would buy ones that did, you know, cover things—which would only make those more comprehensive plans so expensive that hardly anybody would be able to buy them at all. People would be forced to buy skimpy insurance that might not even insure you if you use too much of it."

This isn't a health-care plan that helps you if you need health-care. Not when it would give you higher premiums, higher deductibles, and worse coverage. No, this is a health-care plan that only helps you if you're wealthy and have a lot of investment income.

Read the Washington Post, The Senate health care bill is proof: Trumpism isn’t populism.

Trump voters are real suckers, aren't they.

"That's clear enough from how little thought it puts into actually stabilizing insurance markets versus how much it does into showering the rich with as much money as possible. Indeed, it would go so far as to retroactively cut the capital gains tax — something, remember, that's supposed to be about incentivizing future investment — in an apparent bid to get people to create jobs six months ago. The way it would slash Medicaid to pay for this tax-cutting largesse, though, is even more important. It would be more than just a transfer of wealth from the poor and sick to the rich and healthy. It would be a transfer of financial risk from the government to individuals.

This isn't about keeping taxes low for our time. This is about keeping taxes low for all time. . .

So if you think the problem with Obamacare is that deductibles aren't high enough, markets aren't wobbly enough, and sick people aren't on their own enough, well, the Senate bill is for you. . .

It's an inspiring piece of legislation for everyone who thought Robin Hood was picking on the wrong people."

Read the Washington Post, The real reason Republicans want to pass this Obamacare bill so much.