If you operated a commercial airline, your aircraft full of passengers and more and more passengers wanting to fly with you, would you sell all your jet planes, buy smaller, propeller planes, raise prices, and then use the money from selling your jets to buy an island in the South Pacific?

You certainly would if you were Paul Ryan and Donald Trump and your airplanes were Obamacare and you were intent upon replacing Obamacare with something far less good for consumers but really, really good for your rich friends who like to vacation in the South Pacific.

You see, the real problem with Obamacare, much larger than its rising co-pays and deductibles, is not that it failed or is failing, but that it is succeeding and granting more and more Americans health care for the first time in their lives. And, for Paul Ryan, that creates a huge problem because no matter how he kills Obamacare, and he must kill it, he wants to replace it with something far less in coverage and benefits.

Ryan needs to downsize health care because he wants to eliminate the nearly one trillion dollars in taxes over the next decade that the top 1 percent of Americans pay in a 3.9 percent dividend tax to support the Obamacare program. Ryan hopes to find an additional trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich in other social safety net programs that you use and appreciate, in order to grant the richest 1 percent of Americans a really nice tax cut.

But you should know, Speaker Ryan plans to give you a tax cut too, of about $60 dollars a year. And, in addition to cutting programs you like, he plans to eliminate your mortgage deduction and your deductions for state and local taxes. Oh, but he is still not finished with you. The House speaker wants to give the 1 percent these tax cuts without ending the deficit or balancing the budget, and without protecting Medicare and Social Security, programs he intends to reduce later in 2017.

You see, Ryan could not possibly care less for your actual health care, the entire point of lessening your health care is cutting taxes on the richest Americans…your poorer healthcare is just a by-product. When the CBO reported that 24 million Americans would lose their health insurance entirely under the Ryan plan, Ryan said the really bad news “exceeded his expectations.” He said the CBO report “encouraged” him for his plan.

Now the Speaker is working with the Republican conservative Freedom Caucus, a compassionate group who think, read carefully here, Ryan’s cuts are far too generous. After Ryan earlier offered to eliminate the ten most popular Obamacare benefits like requiring maternity coverage and annual health checks, the Freedom Caucus voted against the plan as too generous. The latest reported conversations with the Freedom Caucus are about abandoning those with pre-existing conditions because they are just too expensive for coverage.

If your congressperson voted for the Ryan plan, and many like Ohio’s U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson did, they voted against their citizens and their voters, in Johnson’s case, some of the deepest poverty folks to be found. But they did so because, after all, ideology matters, and these principled representatives believe so strongly in free enterprise and competition (neither of which exist in healthcare) and small government (which means low or no taxes on the rich) that they strongly supported hurting you in order to save you.

It is all about compassion after all, just compassion directed at someone other than you if you make less than millions per year.

 

Jim Crawford is a retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.