Today’s Managing Health Care Costs Number is 15
Run, right away, to view Sarah Kliff’s 15 charts explaining the Affordable Care Act and the Republican attempt to repeal it. All of Kliff’s charts are simple and spare and tell an important story –one of an unprecedented increase in number of Americans with health insurance, and general satisfaction with the results of the ACA with persistent hatred of the law itself, especially among Republicans.
Some ACA proponents are happy today because Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s advisor, said in an interview that “if you like your insurance, you can keep it.” Jonathan Chait wrote that “Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare may be collapsing.” Ezra Klein wrote “One of Trumps advisors just made repealing Obamacare much, much harder.”
But before you feel any better about the chances that we’ll suffer from a collapse of the exchanges and a dramatic pullback in Medicaid funding, here’s the chart you have to see – from the Tax Policy Center. The Affordable Care Act profoundly redistributed (helping counterbalance our growing economic inequality) by imposing large taxes on the wealthiest 1%, and giving large tax subsidies to those in the bottom two income quintiles.
Repeal of the ACA would be a boon for the rich – decreasing taxes for the top1% by $33,000, and for the top 0.1% by $197,000. This makes me far less confident that the tax subsidies for exchange plan purchase and Medicaid enrollment are really safe from the new Administration and its congressional allies. For all the talk of working class people and fiscal discipline, repealing Obamacare represents a giveaway to the rich and an increase in our national deficit.
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| This suggests that if you like your health insurance and it's provided by your employer you can keep it |
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