White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said he’s not concerned about the rich getting a tax cut under the GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act after a non-partisan office predicting millions would lose insurance.
In an interview on MSNBC Tuesday, Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the taxes that would go away are the taxes imposed by Obamacare, and said he’s not worried about including the cuts.
“Who cares if somebody else benefits? Why do you have to have a system that punishes somebody to help somebody else?” Mulvaney said, adding that Republicans promised to repeal all of Obamacare’s taxes. “Why would it be bad if folks benefited from a small tax deduction at the same time?”
Mulvaney spoke with a number of reporters Tuesday morning in an attempt to hit back against a Congressional Budget Office report that stated 14 million people currently getting health insurance through the Affordable Care Act would not have coverage next year under the GOP’s plan. CBO said many of those would voluntarily go without insurance once the individual mandate and related penalties were removed.
Even so, Mulvaney added that the CBO’s methodology for determining how many people would be covered under the House GOP’s plan is not sound.
“The CBO, we know, just doesn’t do a very good job of counting coverage,” Mulvaney said on Fox News. “The CBO is very good at counting money, but I don’t know why we’ve expected them to be good at counting coverage.”
Mulvaney said the goal of the GOP plan is to not to simply provide health insurance, but to ensure those with health insurance can afford to go to the doctor. He said a lot of people on Obamacare might have health insurance but can’t actually afford to go seek care when they’re sick.
“The people who are on Obamacare, whore are really the target here … know what the problem is,” he said. “And, the problem is they have affordable health insurance, but they have completely unaffordable healthcare.”
He added, “Go find a 55-year-old person who is on Obamacare right now and ask them if they can go to the doctor. They’ll say they can’t. And, they know that under our plan they can.”
Mulvaney declined to say if the White House and House GOP leadership have enough votes to pass the House and he said no vote counting has started in the Senate yet.
