One of the things Obamacare did, and did effectively, was pay for providing health insurance to millions by increasing taxes on a relative handful of high-income Americans. The fact that those tax hikes will go away along with health insurance for 30 million people helps explain why Republican leadership is hell-bent on doing it as soon as possible.
Two taxes that will be presumably axed with the law affect only those making $200,000 or more. The break the ACA repeal will bring to those taxpayers will amount to a $346 billion tax cut in total over 10 years, according to the CBO report on the 2015 repeal legislation GOP lawmakers say they’ll be using as their model next year.
As University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley pointed out on the Incidental Economist blog, this comes as Trump and his surrogates promised that any major tax cut for the rich will be offset by closing their deductions, which would not be the case with the cuts in the ACA repeal.
"That $346 billion represents about $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Every cent will go into the pockets of people making more than $200,000 per year," Bagley wrote. […]
"Repealing the Affordable Care Act is a way to give wealthy people a fairly substantial tax cut without that necessarily being the largest headline," Harry Stein, the director of fiscal policy at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, told TPM. […] “To me personally, that’s the best part about repealing Obamacare,” Ryan Ellis, former tax policy director for Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, told Politico. “Because on the health care side of it, you have this complicated ‘replace’ that you have to turn to after that, but on taxes, it’s all easy—it’s all dessert.”
All dessert for the top 0.1 percent, who are going to see tax savings of $154,000 annually. Boy, when you're in the top 0.1 percent, that $150K is really going to be meaningful. They might even notice it. But probably not as much as the 30 million people who aren't going to have health insurance anymore notice that. Or the people—and employers—who will keep their health insurance, but see premiums go higher and higher. Oh, and the subsidies people are getting to by coverage go away, too, which is essentially a tax-hike for them, since those subsidies basically take the form of tax cuts.
Republicans are definitely not thinking this far ahead yet, but cutting off these revenue streams now will mean that whatever replacement plan they may eventually come up with won't have them. So there's yet another barrier to any eventual Republican replacement program being worth a damn for the people who need coverage.
You can't make this shit up. The first thing Republicans are going to do after the "populist uprising" of 2016 is raise taxes and premiums for working people to give the wealthy a tax break. Yeah, Democrats are not going to lift a finger to help that happen.