Proposed tax cuts will devaste health care coverage

With $473 billion being cut from Medicare, $1.5 trillion being cut from Medicaid over the next decade, and the one percent being gifted hundreds of billions in tax breaks, this makes it more clear than ever that GOP congresspeople don’t care about the average working person, and that corporate donors are using our elected officials like sock puppets.

Make no mistake:  the proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will hurt Americans.

Medicare covers 55 million Americans, and Medicaid, 70 million. And the vast majority of those aren’t people taking advantage of the system, as Republicans so often claim. They’re children, folks with disabilities and people living in nursing homes.

These are people who have no other options. These are kids whose parents cannot afford to pay for doctor’s visits and people living with disabilities severe enough that they cannot work.

According to an analysis by the American Institutes for Research, disabled workers with a high school education earn 37 percent less than peers with similar educations. How can we as a country expect someone earning 37 percent less than most people with a high school education to pay for their healthcare? At that wage, it is simply not possible.

Medicaid, which under the GOP plan would be cut by more than $1.5 trillion over the next decade, is currently covering 60 percent of those living in nursing homes. We cannot in good conscience abandon our parents and grandparents who cannot care for themselves to die.

Though this tax plan wears the face of fiscal conservatism, the corporate tax breaks aren’t truly the issue. The issue is how we’re paying for them: by cutting trillions from healthcare services that protect the most vulnerable among us.

If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to political news over the past year (or eight), you’d notice that every couple months, a new tactic is tested with the hopes of repealing the PPACA, which at present date insures more than 20 million Americans, with the most recent repeal and replace effort being the Graham-Cassidy Bill.

Before that came the BCRA, or Better Care Reconciliation Act, which was merely the Senate version of the House bill entitled the AHCA, or American Health Care Act.

In fact, over the past eight years, the GOP has made more than 50 attempts to repeal what in their minds is the worst thing to happen in this country. Even Ben Carson commented in 2013 that Obamacare was “the worst thing since slavery.” Enslaving an entire race of people purely because of their skin colour is apparently on equal footing with letting poor people go to the doctor.

This entire charade isn’t really about improving conditions for the average American, and it’s not about stimulating the economy or being financially conservative either. Financially conservative would be not proposing a $639 billion military defense budget. This isn’t even about knocking down every monument of sociopolitical progress President Obama made, as is claimed by many a Democrat.

It’s about cash.

After failing to pass a successful PPACA repeal for what is nearing the 60th time, a Republican congressman was reported saying their donors were “furious.”  Particularly angry GOP donors are beginning to back away from the party because even with control over the House, the Senate and the White House, the Republican party is incapable of passing anything that would benefit their wealthy sponsors.

Recently, in an interview with Maria Bartiromo from Fox News, Trump said about the GOP tax plan, “It’s about me representing rich people.”

A government only concerned with profit cannot and will not work to benefit those who have no money to give it, and a government led by a sociopathic billionaire will not care for people who cannot care for themselves.

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