Gruber: Senate Health Bill Takes a ‘Huge Amount’ of Money from the Poor and Gives It to the Rich as a Tax Cut

RUSH EXCERPT:
GRUBER: "What’s wrong is that basically the market by itself cannot provide universal coverage but you have to have government subsidies to make it affordable. Take the Senate bill. The Senate bill in its current form would say that a low income person would qualify for insurance, which would have a deductible of about half of their income. That’s not affordable insurance. It would say that a low income 60-year-old would have to pay about six or $7,000 in premiums for insurance for deductibles that could be a third or half of their income. That’s not affordable. We can debate what support will, 10%, 15% of income. But we can’t argue that an insurance product with a deductible half of your income is affordable. So basically what this does is it takes a huge amount of money away for low income people and redistributes it towards the tax cut for rich people. You can’t shift that kind of money away from the poor to the rich."