Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Tax Cuts And Cancer


(Yet another email to my useless weenie Republican Senator Rob Portman.)
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Portman office staffers:  Please see that Rob himself gets this and reads it fully.  I want and expect a brief personal reply from the Senator, not the usual staff-generated policy boilerplate.
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Tax cuts, cancer, and the GOP playbook, in four steps:

1.  Decide to quickly ram through an enormous tax cut for corporations and wealthy individuals with only Republican votes by using the budget reconciliation loophole and the 51-vote simple majority.

2.  Write your own partisan budget "rules" allowing you to increase the deficit by up to $1.5 trillion, which will of course increase the national debt.  In other words, give yourselves the authority to make make deep tax cuts without paying for them.  (The GOP's self-proclaimed fiscal responsibility is a crock.)

3.  With your tax cut plan reducing federal revenue so much that you struggle to meet the $1.5 trillion deficit cap, you attempt to get there by cutting popular, long-standing tax deductions like mortgage interest, state and local taxes, medical expenses and student loan interest.  Also, you'd trigger an automatic $25 billion cut in the hugely-popular Medicare program.

Heartless bastard 
4.  Trying to stay under your magic number, you now propose to save some more money by eliminating the the ACA's individual coverage mandate.  (Combining tax cuts and health care destruction -- cute.)  This move would mean that more stupid people would go without insurance, thus saving the government some premium subsidy expense but driving up premiums for the rest of us even more!  You've allowed the CSR's to go unfunded, which has already increased premiums, and you refuse to even consider the bipartisan Murray-Alexander bill to restore them and stabilize the individual insurance markets.

It's this last step that's the cruelest insult.  You're willing to trade lives for tax cuts, and I am a prime example.  Your constant undermining of the ACA will kill me -- literally.

That's why I'm writing you again, Rob.  This February I was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic bone cancer.  I've undergone major surgery and radiation.  I'm now being treated and kept alive by a targeted therapy medication, which I will need for the rest of my life.  My total billable medical expenses so far this calendar year are in excess of $325,000.  I'm self-employed and covered by the ACA, and for that, I'm thankful beyond words.  Without the ACA, I'd be broke and dead. 

Rob, here's what I need you to answer for me:  You and your insurance-ignorant party persist in blatantly sabotaging Obamacare.  Now you've dragged it into your tax cut scheme.  When, due to your actions, even my subsidized premiums become impossibly expensive, what would you suggest I do?  Obamacare is my Plan A, my best option by far, and it's working for me.  Since you so desperately want to take it away from me, please tell me, what's my Plan B?

I await your prompt and brief answer.

cc:  Sen. Mitch McConnell 
       Sen. Chuck Schumer
       Sen. Sherrod Brown

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