Don't Give
Me A Tax Cut That Cuts Health Care for Others
By Stephen Prince
Long
before the ACA required larger employers to offer our workers coverage or pay a
penalty, I was already covering my employees. I could have saved millions of
dollars over the years if I had left them uninsured.
But
I believe health care is a basic human right.
That's
the underlying philosophy of the ACA, too. Thanks to it, the number of
uninsured in this country has fallen by more than a third, from almost 50
million seven years ago to around 30 million today. A quarter million
Tennesseans have obtained coverage as a result of the ACA.
The
ACA is paid for in large part through taxes targeted at wealthy households and
on highly-profitable health care industries that benefit from more people
having access to health coverage, like insurance and pharmaceuticals.
If the ACA is repealed, as Republicans threaten, those taxes will disappear. So will health insurance coverage for tens of millions of Americans. Congressional researchers have estimated the number of uninsured would increase by 18 million in the first year and grow to 32 million in nine years.
Premiums would jump by
up to 25 percent in the first year and double by 2026.
Even
as the financial burdens and health-care worries of the newly uninsured would
grow, so would the after-tax incomes of millionaires and billionaires.
Folks in
the Top 1 percent -- those households making over $700,000 a year -- would see
their yearly taxes cut by $33,000, on average. The Top 0.1 percent who earn
more than $3.7 million annually -- would get a nearly $200,000 tax cut, on
average.
The
taxes used to pay for the expanded health coverage under the ACA were carefully
crafted to only affect the wealthy.
By using that money to ease a major
financial squeeze on working families, the ACA improves America's physical
health and also reduces our nation's unhealthy economic inequality.
The
ACA focuses taxes on people in the right income bracket, the top one, and on
the right kind of income, money made from wealth, not work. This passive income
-- such as capital gains, dividends, and interest -- is heavily concentrated
among the super-wealthy.
In many cases it is taxed at much lower rates than
employment income. ACA taxes partially remedy this injustice.
One
ACA tax on the wealthy -- restricted to income over $250,000 -- is
strengthening Medicare, so it can provide many more years of health care to the
40 million elderly and disabled Americans who depend on it.
I
don't need another tax cut and neither does anyone else in my economic
position, especially if it means taking health care away from struggling
working families.
Tennesseans
are lucky that our own Senator Lamar Alexander is chairman of the Senate health
committee, giving him (and us) a big say in what happens to the ACA.
To their
credit, both he and our other U.S. Senator, Bob Corker, have expressed concern
about repealing the taxes paid by the wealthy and big corporations that fund
health care for so many vulnerable Americans.
Just
before the ACA became law, a friend asked if I had thought of reducing my
business' workforce to just below 50 employees to avoid the new health insurance
mandate. I was astounded that he considered such a greedy trick to be a
legitimate business strategy.
I'm
equally astounded that cutting health care for millions while giving tax cuts
to millionaires could be considered good public policy.
Prince
is founder and president of National Business Products in Nolensville.