Conservatives are attempting to revive efforts to gut Obamacare’s individual mandate as part of the Republican overhaul of the tax code.
But the House’s top tax writer, while leaving the door open to a measure President Donald Trump supports, said Friday that such a move would complicate the tax package’s prospects, particularly in the Senate.
“The president feels very strongly about including this at some step before the final process,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady said of mandate repeal during a POLITICO Playbook interview. “No decisions have been made.”
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Republicans are looking under every seat cushion to finance tax cuts and the political bribes that Members of Congress are demanding for their votes. One surprising potential “pay for,” believe it or not, would be repealing ObamaCare’s individual mandate.
The IRS administers the mandate, which ObamaCare euphemistically dubbed an “individual responsibility payment.” But Chief Justice John Roberts called it a tax to declare it constitutional, so a policy and fiscal nexus exists.
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When the GOP released their “Framework” for tax reform last month, official Washington got excited that they could finally chew on all sorts of wonky tax details. They will get even more excited when the full package is out this week. That’s why it was very disappointing to read that Senate Finance Committee Republicans were considering keeping the death tax in place.
That would be a grievous error.
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Democrats claim to have a monopoly on caring for the poor and suffering, and this week the left is portraying a GOP health-care bill as an attack on society’s vulnerable. So check out the data on how ObamaCare is a tax on some low-income families.
IRS data offers insight into who paid the law’s individual mandate penalty in 2015 for not buying health insurance, the latest year for which figures are available. Spoiler alert: The payers aren’t Warren Buffett or any of the other wealthy folks Democrats say they want to tax. More than one in three of taxed households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.
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On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a single-payer health care bill that would create a national health insurance program, charting a stem-to-stern reshaping of the country’s health care system. The bill would make it so that Americans would get health coverage simply by showing a new government-issued card and would no longer owe out-of-pocket expenses like deductibles. But Sanders’ description of his measure omitted specifics about how much it would cost and final decisions about how he would pay for it.
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Single-payer is back on the docket in California. Late last month, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announcedthat he’d formed a special committee “to develop plans for achieving universal health care in California.”
Rendon has been under pressure from progressive activists all summer, ever since he shelved SB 562, a bill passed by the state Senate on June 1 that would put all the state’s residents into a new, state-run single-payer healthcare system. At the time, he deemed it “woefully incomplete.” SB 562 did not specify how, exactly, the state would pay for single-payer.
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The Trump administration and Republican leaders in Congress are pledging to turn their attention toward tax reform after their failure to pass a repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. But Republicans can still improve health care and lower costs if they change the treatment of employer-sponsored health insurance plans in tax reform.
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HHS plans to save taxpayer dollars by curtailing waste and requiring better performance in the ACA Navigator program which pays organizations to enroll people in ObamaCare coverage. The HHS analysis showed that in 2016 “One [Navigator] grantee received $200,000 and enrolled ONE person in Obamacare.” The top 10 most costly Navigators spent a total of $2.77 million to enroll 314 people in Obamacare—costing an average of $8,800 to enroll each person (on top of tax credits and other subsidies). In the upcoming enrollment period, CMS plans to spend $10 million on promotional activities—consistent with similar spending on Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D.
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“It is a have-to-get-done that’s really hard to get done,” said one lobbyist.
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Congressional Republicans plan to use the next four weeks away from Washington making a public case for a sweeping rewrite of the tax code, an ambitious legislative undertaking they hope will heal divisions that opened when the party’s signature health-care bill collapsed. But at home in their districts, they face pressures that could make it hard to focus on taxes.
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