The GOP "Flim-Flam" Show Now Fully Up and Running at 1600 PA Avenue

BS Artist Par Excellence

Our tax reform plan will help the American middle class

(Stop it - you're killing me)

More in the GOP’s continuing saga: “Raping America One Bill at a Time” – this is Chapter 69 by my count. This latest, again, is their assault on healthcare from The Hill analysis in part here with this headline:

“The Republican plan is to take away your health care to pay for their tax cuts”

Just like with their failed health care bill, Republicans have been working to quickly jam through their tax bill before the American people, or even tax experts, understand what's in it. But what we already know about the bill makes Republican priorities 

clear: They want to take away health care from millions of Americans to pay for tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy few.

Over the summer, we saw a health care repeal bill that cut taxes for the wealthy by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Now we have a tax cut bill paid for by increasing the ranks of the uninsured by 13 million, raising premiums for the middle-class, and cutting Medicare.

For Republicans, it seems that health care for middle-class families is little more than a piggy bank to be used to pay back their wealthy donors with enormous tax breaks.

They announced that they would be including repeal of the individual mandate in their plan to cuts taxes for the wealthy. The nonpartisan CBO estimates that doing so would result in 13 million fewer people with health coverage by 2025 and 10 percent higher premiums over the next decade.

That translates to a premium increase of $1,990 in 2019 for a typical middle-class family of four that buys insurance on its own. As Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) correctly noted, “for some middle-income people, [the premium increase] will cancel out their tax cut.”

On top of that, CBO revealed that the Republican tax bill would result in a $25 billion Medicare cut in 2018. Further, hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts to the program over the next ten years. 

The greatest risk from these cuts would be to rural hospitals, given their thin operating margins.

Note: Rural hospitals – um, doesn’t than mean rural folks and thus the GOP rural vote base, too?

Well I guess that base already has great healthcare and are content with their tax bracket and happy larks about what is now unfolding?

In the end, however, this flim-flam show will be priceless - just watching McConnell and Company tap dancing is worth the price — pass the popcorn…

Also, to be honest, it sure seems the country is waking up to this latest (but not newest) GOP scam, or con, or ploy, or what other label one chooses to tag it. But, gimmick sure sounds most apropos doesn’t it?

Stay tuned and as always, thanks for stopping by.