John,

As I stood outside on the Capitol Steps with partners to bear witness¹, at 1 am this morning the House Rules Committee started their marathon consideration of the House’s Billionaire Budget. This is the last step before the bill moves to the floor for a full House vote as soon as this evening.

Your members of Congress need to hear from you ASAP to stop this bill.

Send a direct message to Congress today, urging them to reject the Billionaire Budget.

A new report from the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that this bill would decrease the after-tax income of taxpayers earning $51,000 or less while increasing the after-tax income of the top 0.1% of taxpayers by $389,000.² This report looks at the combined impact of extreme cuts in basic needs programs and tax breaks. Because people earning $51,000 or less will take big losses in health care, nutrition, and other benefits and get almost nothing from the tax breaks, they take a loss. But people at the top make stunning and unconscionable gains from the bill’s tax giveaways.

Despite trillions in tax breaks for the rich and corporations, the bill will let one tax credit expire: an expanded tax credit for Affordable Care Act health insurance premiums. This will make insurance unaffordable for around 4.2 million people, undoing important progress in covering more low-wage earners.³ This comes on top of the 7.6 million people who will lose Medicaid coverage and more via other attacks on the ACA.

All told, if this bill becomes law, roughly 15 million people will lose their health care.⁴ And many of these same families will lose access to SNAP, the Child Tax Credit, and more.

What makes it even worse is that some extremists still aren’t satisfied.⁵ They want even deeper cuts to critical human needs programs. They started by speeding up Medicaid rules that people must document their work or show that they are exempt from work requirements. There is a great deal of evidence that rules like this cause people to lose Medicaid because they get tangled in red tape—they don’t receive notices, or can’t supply documents in the required time, or don’t read English well enough to fill out forms, and can’t get through to call centers to ask questions. A great many people who either do work or would be exempt because of a disability will lose Medicaid—that’s happened in places like Arkansas where this has been tried.⁶

And they aren’t stopping there—with a plan to discuss more cuts to Medicaid at the White House this afternoon.⁷ This bill takes from the poor to give to the rich, which is no way to run a society.

Congress must hear from us clearly: Send a message to Congress urging them to vote against this cruel budget.

Thank you for all you do,

Deborah Weinstein
Executive Director, CHN Action

¹ photo from CHN’s Deb Weinstein and others standing on the Capitol Steps overnight during the early hours of the Rules consideration
² G.O.P. Tax Bill May Hurt the Lowest Earners and Help the Richest
³ By the Numbers: House Bill Takes Health Coverage Away From Millions of People and Raises Families’ Health Care Costs
⁴ By the Numbers: House Bill Takes Health Coverage Away From Millions of People and Raises Families’ Health Care Costs
⁵ Conservatives Imperil G.O.P. Megabill That Would Fulfill Trump’s Agenda
⁶ Understanding the Intersection of Medicaid and Work: An Update
⁷ GOP leaders prepare to squeeze hard-liner holdouts