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Our precious Commander-In-Tweets and his cohorts always looking out for the little guy who voted for them.  It must be nice to prey on the ill-informed and uneducated by simply throwing out keywords like "Mexican" and "Muslim."

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House Republicans have a plan to remake the U.S. health-care system—with a perk for wealthy investors.

Included in their proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is a tax break for the wealthy. The Obamacare replacement bill, unveiled on Monday night and endorsed by President Donald Trump with a tweet on Tuesday morning, eliminates the net investment income tax, a 3.8 percent surcharge on almost all earnings from investments. The net investment income tax is paid only by single people with incomes above $200,000 and married couples earning more than $250,000.

The average hit from the NIIT doesn't get beyond three figures unless you're in the top 1 percent of earners. The tax casts a wide net, though. Investors must pay that additional 3.8 percent on proceeds that include capital gains, dividends, interest, royalties, rental income, and passive business income.

"My sense is that this [tax] is not one that's easy to avoid or evade," said Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington.

Eliminating the NIIT, introduced to help pay for health-care expansion under Obamacare, would reduce government coffers as the Trump administration is seeking budget cuts in many departments and as the cost of repealing and replacing Obamacare is in the spotlight. Repealing the tax would cost the U.S. Treasury $158 billion over 10 years, according to new estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan congressional panel that studies tax policy.

The NIIT isn't the only tax in the Affordable Care Act that House Republicans want to eliminate. They're also targeting a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning salons, a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices, and a 0.9 percent Additional Medicare Tax on the wages of upper-income taxpayers.

The benefit to taxpayers of eliminating the NIIT would be concentrated at the top of the income spectrum. The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay about 90 percent of the net investment income tax, according to Tax Policy Center estimates. The top 0.1 percent pay 62 percent. Doing away with the NIIT would boost after-tax incomes of the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers by 2.2 percent, or an average of about $165,000 a year.

A repeal of the NIIT could offer the wealthy an opportunity for some clever tax planning. Post-repeal, it might make sense to move into a more income-oriented portfolio, for example, said Tim Steffen, director of financial planning at Robert W. Baird & Co. It also might affect when taxpayers decide to sell investments and take capital gains. Investors today could avoid the tax by waiting to sell until 2018, when it is slated for repeal. 

"This tax going away will certainly have an impact," Steffen said. But he warned not to let news from Washington dictate investment decisions quite yet. If the NIIT is eventually repealed, taxpayers will have a chance to come up with a planning strategy at the end of this year, he said. Until then, "we don't know if this is actually going to happen or not."

Most taxpayers, even high earners, will scarcely feel the savings. The bottom 90 percent of taxpayers, those earning less than $209,000 a year, almost never pay the net investment income tax. Those in the 90th to 95th percentiles, earning from $209,000 to $292,100 a year, pay an average of $30 a year in net investment income taxes.

 

One side effect of the NIIT was to bring the tax rates on investment income a little more in line with the taxes paid by workers. While the top tax rate on some investment income is 39.6 percent, the same as the top rate for labor income, the top rate for long-term capital gains and qualified dividends is 20 percent. Workers, meanwhile, are subject to payroll taxes, including Social Security and Medicare.

So a wealthy person who lives exclusively off investments still probably pays a much lower tax rate than, say, a doctor, lawyer, or other well-paid professional. The net investment income tax narrows that gap a bit.

 
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The Republicans are on the hook for correcting what never should have been in the first place.  Government getting into the Healthcare insurance business was unconstitutional from the beginning and whether it's the Democrats or Republicans what's unconstitutional is unconstitutional.   Government can keep an industry or monopoly from abusing citizens but that wasn't happening. 

The PROBLEM from the beginning was the COST of healthcare which rose unbelievably to the point that some people were getting one price while the next person would be charged 2 to 10 times more for the same procedure depending on whether or not they had insurance.  I'm not saying that there wasn't a problem with the Health Insurance companies which seemed to get together and control their pricing and increase their profits at the expense of people. 

Before Democratic Healthcare (aka Obamacare) there wasn't people being turned away from Hospitals or refused healthcare in emergency rooms and while there were people that could not afford whatever treatment they got the cost for those people were usually written off by the hospitals and ended up being written off in their taxes in the long run and we, taxpayers, most likely ended up paying for it anyway.

All that is a moot point now because the Democrats, under the guise of "helping people" got the government into what the government should have never been into and now it has to be fixed and returned to the open market system.  The question is can the Republicans do it?  Will they do it?  Can they do it without making things worse?    Time will tell but I'm not going to believe anything until the bill is voted on and signed and see where it goes then.

Obamacare or the ACA could have been great and really made strides in the Healthcare of this country had Republicans not refused to include a single payer option.   However, they were smart and they knew there would be great hurdles without the single payer option and that their minions would constantly spout off about how Obamacare was terrible and ruined healthcare!!!   They keep on shoveling it in, and their conservative voting base keeps on eating it up.

MonkeysUncleByMarriage posted:

Obamacare or the ACA could have been great and really made strides in the Healthcare of this country had Republicans not refused to include a single payer option.   However, they were smart and they knew there would be great hurdles without the single payer option and that their minions would constantly spout off about how Obamacare was terrible and ruined healthcare!!!   They keep on shoveling it in, and their conservative voting base keeps on eating it up.

What are you talking about?  Republicans had no say in the law. It was written by Democrat senators and lobbyists in seclusion.  Then, presented to the Senate.  Only limited debate was allowed and neither party was allowed to offer amendments.  It passed the Senate with no Republicans voting for it.  Same treatment in the House -- limited debate and no amendments allowed. Again, in the House, it passed with only Democrats voting for it. 

Now, as to single payer, no nation on Earth has single payer.  Two used to have it -- the Soviet Union and Canada.  The USSR paid doctors less than mechanics because humans were worth less than machines to the State.  Canada ceased to have single payer when their Supreme Court ruled that the pain and suffering patients endured waiting for specialists met the international definition of torture.  Now private healthcare insurance, hospitals and doctors are back -- mainly in the most populous province of Ontario.  Other provinces got around the ruling by contracting out to US providers.

Remember when Democrats touted the VA hospitals as exemplars of single payer?  Not any more.

 

You may call it a public option.  And it was set to pass, but then the Republicans got good ol' "independent" Joe LIeberman vote against it.  Of course the insurance companies had conbrituted 500k to his reelection.. so I guess thats politics.   And it would have worked fabulously, the ACA.   But yall keep on blaming all that on Obama.  Republicans had their scapegoat ready and you numbnuts eat it up.

MonkeysUncleByMarriage posted:

Obamacare or the ACA could have been great and really made strides in the Healthcare of this country had Republicans not refused to include a single payer option.   However, they were smart and they knew there would be great hurdles without the single payer option and that their minions would constantly spout off about how Obamacare was terrible and ruined healthcare!!!   They keep on shoveling it in, and their conservative voting base keeps on eating it up.

The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency which would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government. The public option was initially proposed for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but was removed after Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) threatened a filibuster.[1][2]

Debate in 2009-10[edit]

The public option was featured in three bills considered by the United States House of Representatives in 2009: the proposed Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962), which was passed by the House in 2009, its predecessor, the proposed America's Affordable Health Choices Act (H.R. 3200), and a third bill, the Public Option Act, also referred to as the "Medicare You Can Buy Into Act", (H.R. 4789). In the first two bills, the public option took the form of a Qualified Health Benefit Plan competing with similar private insurance plans in an internet-based exchange or marketplace, enabling citizens and small businesses to purchase health insurance meeting a minimum federal standard. The Public Option Act, in contrast, would have allowed all citizens and permanent residents to buy into a public option by participating in the public Medicare program. Persons covered by other employer plans or by state insurance plans such as Medicare would have not been eligible to obtain coverage from the exchange. The federal government's health insurance plan would have been financed entirely by premiums without subsidy from the Federal government,[3] although some plans called for government seed money to get the programs started.[4]

President Barack Obama promoted the idea of the public option while running for election in 2008.[5] Following his election, Obama downplayed the need for a public health insurance option, including calling it a "sliver" of health care reform,[6] but still campaigned for the option up until the health care reform was passed.[7]

Ultimately, the public option was removed from the final bill. While the United States House of Representatives passed a public option in their version of the bill, the public option was voted down in the Senate Finance Committee[8] and the public option was never included in the final Senate bill, instead opting for state-directed health insurance exchanges.[9] Critics of the removal of the public option accused President Obama of making an agreement to drop the public option from the final plan,[10] but the record showed that the agreement was based on vote counts than backroom deals, as substantiated by the final vote in the Senate.[1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...n#cite_note-Halpin-2

Republicans were not capable of holding back Democrats until Scott Brown was sworn in and if dems had only bargained with the RINOs just a little, you might have gotten a few Republican votes.

The Feds have had the right by laws passed to run the world
of Insurance for many years now. They never took that on
because they didn't know how and the cost would be great
for everyone concerned. A true to life example is Obama care.
Insurance companies are dropping it as fast as possible and
the Feds are too stupid run it. And just as stupid are some
people still want it. 

I blame the Democrats for this miserable creation but no way can anyone pin this on Republicans or anyone that knows anything because they (Republicans) couldn't stop nothing when Obamacare/democratic Healthcare was enacted as the Democrats had super majorities in both houses of Congress.  Now just as much blame, in my opinion, sets in one man's corner and that man is Chief Justice John Roberts who gave in to the media and public pressure and made a way for it to be declared Constitutional when it was so obvious that there was no way it should have been Constitutional and the Supreme court should have stopped it cold when they had a chance. 

So while the Democrats dumped this on the United States and everyone but themselves since they gave themselves an out and made themselves exempt from the law, they have paid and should have paid a high political price.  I very much think that Healthcare alone has greatly contributed to the Republican takeover in the majority of States and the House and Senate that we see now.

Republicans for their part should take warning though that now that they have control or can force their hand the public will hold them to account.  IF the Democrats are smart they will start running and finding Conservative Democrats to run and elect them and give the public an option.  As it is the Democratic party has been hijacked by extreme liberals and they have effectively excluded all other opposition within the party to the point that the whole party is extreme.

One more comment regarding the "single payer" option or actually what would be Government run option.  I fully believe that it was the plan, of the Democrats, to make the Government the ONLY provider of insurance for healthcare, in the US. 

Any person that knows anything about the Constitution knows and can understand that the founders and the Constitution, with it's restrictions upon federal government, knows that they would never want the Federal government involved in such an endeavor.  Essentially what it seems they were wanting is to put the insurance companies out of business or federalize them to the point that the Government ran all of healthcare and thus would determine who got what benefits and what would be paid.  Additionally while there was the rejection that there would be, what was known as, death panels, it was evident that there would have been.   Decisions about who would live and die would be made by committee and pre-determined based upon a person's potential benefit to or drain upon society.   Once you go there it would be very easy for there to be bias injected into the equation and one group receive favorable treatment over another. 

The free market is the only and best way to accomplish things given our Government system and the Constitution.  If any Governmental body should be involved then it should be, and stop at, the State level and go no higher.  If a State wanted to benefit it's citizens with taxpayer assistance or programs that would help people then it's up to the States, each of them, to make that decision and from it they could attract people to come live in their State for whatever benefits they might be provided.  Either way I don't believe it's within the Constitution's limits upon Federal Government to allow the Federal Government to become involved in Healthcare.   At least that's my own opinion.

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