Senator backs ending health mandate

Support from Alaska’s Murkowski appears to provide major boost to Republican overhaul of U.S. tax code

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Tuesday that she supports repealing the Affordable Care’s Act individual mandate, potentially providing a boost to the GOP’s efforts to overhaul the tax code.

The Republican moderate announced in an op-ed in Alaska’s Daily News-Miner that she supports eliminating a key Affordable Care Act provision requiring Americans to have health insurance or pay a fine. Senate Republicans included a repeal of the measure in their version of a massive tax overhaul bill introduced this month, a move that raised doubts whether moderate Republicans would support the effort.

Repealing the individual mandate would free up more than $300 billion of government funding in the next decade that Republicans would use to finance their proposed tax cuts, but it would result in 13 million fewer people having health insurance, according to the nonpartisan Congressio- nal Budget Office.

Murkowski has not said whether she will vote for the tax bill, and several other GOP senators have raised concerns. Republicans need 50 votes to advance the bill. Murkowski did not mention her views on the tax effort in the op-ed.

“I have always supported the freedom to choose,” she wrote, writing that she still believes the Affordable Care Act has helped many people in her state and would continue to do so if Congress were to drop the individual mandate.

“Repealing the individual mandate simply restores to people the freedom to choose. Nothing else about the structure of the ACA would be changed,” Murkowski wrote.

Almost one in 10 taxpayers initially would see a tax hike under the revised Senate Republican tax plan, and the proposal would add as much as $2.4 trillion in longterm debt, according to two new analyses raising fresh concerns before next week’s expected Senate vote.

The Tax Policy Center said that although taxes on average would be reduced across all income groups under the plan, 9 percent of taxpayers would pay more in 2019 and half would pay more by 2027, as the tax cuts for individuals expire. Lower-income households initially would see average tax cuts of $50 a year, about 0.3 percent of after-tax income, while upper-income households would see cuts of more than $12,000, or 3.5 percent of after-tax income.

At the same time, a Penn Wharton budget model released Tuesday said revenues would fall between $1.3 trillion and $1.5 trillion by 2027, on par with other outside analyses, but in the next decade, revenues would fall between $1.1 trillion and $2.1 trillion, increasing the federal debt by $1.7 trillion to $2.4 trillion by 2040.

That’s less than earlier projections of up to $7 trillion in debt, before Senate Republicans revised the bill to keep costs down, in part by allowing the individual tax cuts to expire. But it may still concern some budget hawks.