Budget director says ‘we’re OK’ with dropping provision of Republican tax reform that would also repeal healthcare mandate, if it becomes roadblock

The White House is willing to sacrifice Republicans’ latest attempt to dismantle Obama’s Affordable Care Act if that’s necessary to pass a series of sweeping tax cuts, the Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, said on Sunday.

Republicans’ current tax reform legislation would slash corporate tax rates and benefit wealthy Americans. Last week, after the president tweeted that he wanted legislation to include a repeal of a key healthcare mandate, Senate Republicans announced they would include the healthcare measure in their tax bill.



Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) I am proud of the Rep. House & Senate for working so hard on cutting taxes {& reform.} We’re getting close! Now, how about ending the unfair & highly unpopular Indiv Mandate in OCare & reducing taxes even further? Cut top rate to 35% w/all of the rest going to middle income cuts?

“If it becomes an impediment to getting the best tax bill we can, then we’re OK with taking it out,” Mulvaney told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “It’s up to the Senate and the House to hammer out those details.”

“I don’t actually” think it’s an impediment now, Mulvaney added.

“If we can repeal part of Obamacare as part of a tax bill, and we have a tax bill that is still a good tax bill that can pass, that’s great.”

A non-partisan analysis concluded that if the Senate tax bill became law, Americans who earned $30,000 or less each year would begin to pay higher taxes starting in 2021.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Mulvaney about this statistic and whether it was appropriate that low-income families would see their taxes go up as people in the highest-income levels get thousands or even millions of dollars of tax relief.

“Every time I come on your network, we have a discussion about how the proposed tax bill is going to lower taxes on the rich,” Mulvaney said, saying that he had “to smile” at the question.

Asked why the corporate tax cuts in the bill are permanent, while ones for individual Americans will sunset by 2025, Mulvaney said that “ this is where Washington really does speak a different language” and that the sunsetting provisions were necessary to work within the rules of the Senate and “simply trying to essentially manipulate the numbers and game the system so that you can fall into this square peg”.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said on Sunday the tax legislation was “terrible”, and “must be defeated”, arguing that it could pave the way for major cuts to social services in the future.

“When they run up a $1.5tn deficit, as they will in this legislation, they’re going to come back – and that’s what Paul Ryan is saying – they’re going to come back with massive cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid, because they say, oh, my goodness, the deficit and the national debt are too high,” Sanders said.

“When the middle class is shrinking, when our infrastructure is falling apart, when young people can’t afford to go to college, are leaving school deeply in debt, when 28 million people have no health insurance, does anyone really think that the major crisis facing this country is the need to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very richest people in this country?”

Who wins and loses in Trump's tax plan? Read more

Republicans have made repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, a political priority for years. But repeal legislation has repeatedly foundered, with key Republicans withholding support from voting for a repeal that analysts say would leave tens of millions more Americans without health insurance.

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans announced their tax legislation would include a repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate, the requirement that most Americans have health insurance.

“I personally think that it complicates tax reform,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the critical Republican votes against a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, said earlier in the week.

On Sunday she told CNN: “I think we need to distinguish between taking away insurance from people who already have it, which is what the healthcare bill we considered earlier this year would have done, versus removing a fine on people who choose not to have insurance.”

Asked if the tax bill benefits the rich more than those in the middle class, she said: “It benefits people of all tax brackets. But what I want to do is to skew more that relates to middle- and low-income families.”