The bill that Republicans passed today is - to use tumps expressions - "an absolute disaster". It really has nothing to do with health care. It has everything to do with an enormous shift of wealth from working people to the richest Americans. This bill would throw 24 million Americans off of health insurance, cut Medicaid by $880 billion, defund Planned Parenthood and substantially increase premiums on older Americans. Meanwhile, it would provide a $300 billion tax break to the top 2 percent and hundreds of billions more to the big drug and insurance companies that are ripping off the American people.
Obamacare included tax increases that hit wealthy Americans hardest in order to pay for its coverage expansion. The AHCA would get rid of those taxes —
tax cuts that add up to $883 billion, the majority of them benefiting the wealthy, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Obamacare was
one of the biggest redistributions of wealth from the rich to the poor; the AHCA would reverse that.
Amendments were so last-minute that House members like Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) told reporters they still hadn’t read the bill by Wednesday night, just hours before they were expected to vote on it. The House also voted on this bill without a review from the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates how many people the bill covers and how much it would cost.
Instead of throwing tens of millions of Americans off of health insurance, health care must be guaranteed as a right to every American.