Last updated on June 5th, 2014 at 11:41 pm
As Republicans refuse to fund the VA to its needs and continue to sell themselves out to the highest corporate bidder, going to bat for more tax breaks for big business whilst imposing austerity on Americas workers, they are also coming for your Obamacare tax credits.
Republicans are demanding a halt to all tax credits issued to millions of Americans who signed up for insurance through the Obamacare exchanges in a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew signed by, among many others, GOP budget “wonk” Paul Ryan (R-WI), who never did manage to balance his own budget.
Republicans claim they need to pick pocket Americans because the Health and Human Services department is still verifying some income information for some families. The Republicans will stop at no measure of oversight to make sure the entire law is messed up in order to keep some people from getting away with something somewhere. Of course, this timeline for verification was expected and anticipated by all who actually read the legislation.
Ways and Means Committee Democrats point out that Republicans are doing this “even though that was always anticipated, which is why the law allows 90 days to resolve any discrepancies.”
Yes, we can’t have “discrepancies”. Best that all Americans who signed up for health insurance be jacked around and possibly lose their insurance to make sure that there aren’t any discrepancies. This only applies to humans, you understand, because when contractors lose billions in Iraq, those kind of discrepancies are Too Big To Fail.
Lest you think that this is a sign of proper oversight and loyal opposition, in 2006, CBS reported, “(M)uch of the $50 billion, which is more than the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security, has been handed out to companies in Iraq with little or no oversight. Billions of dollars are unaccounted for, and there are widespread allegations of waste, fraud and war profiteering.”
Here are the numbers behind the GOP’s demand to immediately halt all tax credits that have been issued, per the Ways and Means Committee:
6,800,000 Number of individuals and families that received tax credits through the ACA’s marketplace
$4,400 Average tax credit that individuals and families received through the ACA marketplace, according to CBO
“What’s troubling is that in their zeal to continue to play politics with Americans’ health insurance, congressional Republicans are now trying to deny tax credits to millions of individuals and families just weeks after many of them signed up for coverage,” commented Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Democrat Carl Levin.
Just another day of playing politics at the expense of the people. Republicans would love to create more chaos with Obamacare (more than their state refusals to implement state exchanges and then federal refusal to fund the federal exchange to handle the resulting overload). The media could report on the horror show of Obamacare tax credits being ripped away from at-risk families, and of course, Obama and the Democrats would be blamed for this.
But the real question here is why Senate Republicans blocked a $21 billion plan to build new VA clinics because they said it was too expensive, but House Republicans advanced a $600 billion tax cut for business. If there is $600 billion for business, then maybe Republicans can let the ACA law follow procedure.
Republicans want you to believe that business requires no oversight; we must let business have its way. But people – oh heavens, people are evil, lazy, no-good cheaters who will rob the government and must be monitored every which way at all times by big government GOP.
Of course, businesses are run by people, so this argument is a total failure, made worse by the acknowledgement that while most people have a moral compass, businesses have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to make a profit. Business has no moral compass. It will lie, cheat and steal so long as the market will bear it.
So in reality it is big business that needs oversight first and foremost. That’s just logic. But Republicans are too busy picking the pockets of average Americans to bother with things like integrity, principle, intellectual honesty, and even token compassion.
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