Charles P Pierce: This Is Not a Healthcare Bill -It's a tax cut.

[kpete]

This Is Not a Healthcare Bill
It's a tax cut

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You heard the drums beating all weekend. The Republicans do not care that fewer people will be covered than are covered now. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, was quite plain that he's going to hang his vestigial humanity on the concept of "access," which is a bogus metric on many levels. (Right now, as I sit here, I have "access" to a Cabriolet. Don't have the money to buy it, though.) I just heard a conservative pundit on MSNBC say that coverage is "not a Republican priority" in the healthcare debate, which at least is honest.

And now that the numbers are out, it seems they have been very true to their words. There will be 14 million more uninsured Americans in 2018 and 24 million a decade from now. That's a lot of preventable illness and death right there. The "savings" in the CBO report rely on the notion that the government will save $30 million a year by throwing people off Medicaid. A lot of people are going to lose health insurance, and a lot of people are going to get sick and die who would have done neither if we'd just left everything passed in 2009 alone.

But that's not the point of this bill. This bill is a tax cut in sheep's clothing, and the sheep's clothing doesn't even fit very well over the fangs.


MORE:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53834/cbo-report-republican-healthcare/