Obamacare repeal is not dead. Far from it.

GOP tax bills are an assault on health care.

It has been just two months since the Senate gave up on trying to pass a series of health care bills that Americans had soundly rejected in poll after poll. Yet the same Republican recipe for health care is back on the table in the form of the lopsided tax bill that the Senate plans to vote on this week.

Many people are intimidated by the idea of trying to understand the tax bill. It’s a shame because, much like congressional budgets, tax bills reveal priorities. And GOP priorities haven’t changed since the party failed to accomplish its three-part health care agenda: Cut the money going toward health care for low-income people, seniors and kids; use that money to cut taxes for upper-income people; and end the federal protections that stopped discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.

The dollars and cents of the House and Senate tax bills point to the same winners and losers as the earlier health bills. The beneficiaries? Corporations and wealthy individuals (particularly those who stand to inherit large estates), who get large permanent tax cuts. And like the health bills, these cuts are paid for largely with health cuts that would affect people with private coverage, Medicare and Medicaid.

To start, some $338 billion helping millions of working-class Americans pay for insurance is on the block to be cut. Republicans argue these people are being compelled to buy policies and so neither they nor anyone else will be hurt. That’s simply untrue.

Yes, there is a requirement that Americans purchase health care or pay a penalty, and the Senate GOP proposes to remove it. And requiring people to do something is not wildly popular. But why does that requirement exist? Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney put it this way in 2011: “It is fundamentally a conservative principle to insist that people take personal responsibility as opposed to turning to government for giving out free care.”

It’s also a good basic insurance principle — more people with insurance reduces everyone’s costs. The non-parti- san Congressional Budget Office expects everyone’s insurance to cost 10% more if the Senate GOP is successful.

The American Academy of Actuaries, an independent, just-the-facts body, goes further and predicts “severe market disruption and loss of coverage” as insurers stop offering policies.

That’s not all. In the tax bill passed this month by the House, Americans who have serious chronic conditions, or pay for nursing home care or highcost medications, would not be able to deduct medical expenses. Nearly half have annual incomes under $50,000, more than half are 65 and older, and their medical bills are often crippling.

This assault on the sick fits with the executive order the president signed last month. It is designed to give insurance companies loopholes so they can exclude people with pre-existing conditions, adding an effective surcharge to policies that do cover people with pre-existing conditions.

To pave the way for this tax bill, Republicans passed a budget that over 10 years allows them to grow the debt by up to $1.5 trillion. So far, most of the party's deficit hawks are suspiciously silent. There is a half-hearted set of GOP talking points claiming the economy will grow enough to offset those lost taxes, but 37 out of 38 economists recently surveyed disagreed.

More likely, the $1.5 trillion budget hole will be used to meet the objectives of the failed health care repeal bills — to make dramatic cuts to the Medicaid and Medicare programs. Many of these cuts will occur automatically. Under a 2010 pay-as-you-go law, Medicare will automatically face draconian cuts of roughly $250 billion over 10 years. And three former Defense secretaries warned that the tax bill would endanger national security funding, which should make John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, think twice before signing on.

Tax cuts for the wealthy? Health care repeal? Call it what you will. For this Congress and White House, they are two sides of the same coin — gold on one side, lead on the other.