The House of Representatives is now operating under what's actually called "martial law." That means that the rules that say there has to be at least a day between a bill being introduced and being sent to the floor are thrown out. So between now and Monday, March 27, anything House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to force onto the floor can be. Why? Because Ryan wants to kill Medicaid now so he can have tax cuts later.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has made a key Republican motive for pushing ahead with the House GOP health plan explicit in recent interviews: passing the health package first facilitates deeper tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in subsequent tax legislation.
That’s because the House GOP health plan reduces revenues by nearly $900 billion over the decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), including $592 billion in tax cuts largely for the wealthy. Passing these tax cuts now as part of a health package allows the GOP to offset their cost through cuts to health care spending—particularly in Medicaid, which CBO estimates the House health care bill cuts by $880 billion over ten years. If these tax cuts were part of tax reform legislation rather than being in the health bill, Republican leaders would have to offset their cost on the tax side to maintain revenue neutrality, as they have said they would do, limiting how sharply they can cut tax rates.
Instead, because these tax cuts are in the health bill, Republicans can, in writing their tax bill later this year, make much deeper cuts in tax rates — particularly for corporations — than they otherwise could do.
Ryan freely admits it: "And so yes, it is important that we get this [the health plan] done so that we can do tax reform. Because this bill also takes out about $900 billion in tax increases, the Obamacare tax increases are taken out which makes it $900 billion easier to reform the tax code afterwards." And he's got popular vote loser Donald Trump snowed into believing that this is somehow how legislating happens. That there are laws that mean it has to work this way.
When he talked about tax reform late last month, in the infamous "Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated," statement, he said: “I can’t do it [tax reform] until we do health care, because we have to know what the health care is going to cost and—statutorily—that’s the way it is. So for those people who say, ‘oh, gee, I wish we could do the tax first,’ it just doesn’t work that way. I would like to do the tax first.” There's not statute. It's strategy and it's politics. It's Ryan taking health care away from millions now to make it easier to give that money to the rich later.
Help the fight. The House is still scheduled to vote on Trumpcare TODAY. Even if you already called your member of Congress, do it again by calling the Capitol Hill switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Jam the phone lines, urge them to vote NO.