By skyforbes 
By: K. Joseph Semanick
Updated 9:45 PM ET, Mon March 14, 2017
The American Health Care Act (AHCA) might just be a sneaky way to cut Medicaid for the poor so that tax cuts can be given to the wealthy, as the numbers suggest. In the first part of our series we outlined the mechanics of the bill in detail.
And today the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its report showing Medicaid cuts of $880 billion and tax cuts of $768 billion (through 2026). This is consistent with our estimates calculated last week: The Cost of the American Health Care Act.
Although subsidies are lowered and benefit requirements are removed for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), little else has been changed to the ACA. This proposed legislation appears to be a Trojan horse, designed to provide tax cuts at the expense of Medicaid.
As we’ll explore in our next article in the series, 24 million currently enrolled in health insurance will lose coverage by 2026 according to the CBO. And it should not come as a surprise because there was nothing in the bill designed to provide additional coverage or lower the cost of health care. The lower premiums touted by Republicans would mostly be a result of higher deductibles, copays and out-of-pocket maximums.
While coverage is stripped from tens of millions, the $337 billion in savings will be touted as a victory. But an annual reduction of $34 billion to the federal deficit, while a large part of the country goes without health care is hardly a victory.
Such minor savings and severe reductions in care for low-income individuals has both fiscally-conservatives on the right and socially-conscious liberals on the left unhappy with the American Health Care Act.