Health plan may keep O ‘rich’ tax

Bid to win over moderates

Senate Republican leaders are considering keeping the ObamaCare tax on high-income earners, in what would be a dramatic shift to attract more support for their health-care plan, sources said Thursday.

In a bid to attract moderate holdouts, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is eyeing a number of taxes inside ObamaCare’s framework that, if kept in place, could allow Republicans to boost funds for opioid treatment and tweak the proposed cuts to Medicaid that have been criticized by GOP senators from Medicaid-expansion states.

McConnell is already looking to add $45 billion for the opioid crisis. Reversing the bill’s current tax break for high-income earn- ers would give GOP leaders even more room to negotiate with holdouts.

It could also complicate Democrats’ critique of the bill by eliminating their argument that the plan benefits wealthy individuals at the expense of middle-class Americans and the poor.

One Obama-era tax in particular — a net investment income tax of 3.8 percent on Americans making $200,000 or more — would give Republicans more than $170 billion to work with if kept intact.

“If we decided that we were not to repeal that . . . we would know that we would have $172 billion available that we could reapply back into some of the issues that have been of concern to some people around the country,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) told MSNBC.

Others warned that conservatives would balk at such a move.

“The more you do this, the more it’s like ObamaCare,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters Thursday.

“So eventually, you’re going to cross a line where saying you repeal and replace ObamaCare, it’ll be hard to say with a straight face.”

Renewed discussions surrounding the ObamaCare taxes came as the independent Congressional Budget Office released a new score Thursday that said Medicaid spending would be reduced by 35 percent in the second decade of the GOP bill, compared with a 26 percent reduction from 2017 to 2026.

“We’ve made some good progress and we’ll keep working,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday.