For a European living in Sweden, a country which is often criticized for being "socialist", this is absolutely unbelievable. Health insurance is now going to require a significant part of the salary from poor people, a smaller and less noticeable amount of the salary from people with middle income, and reduce the costs by some relatively insignificant amount for high income groups. It takes one trillion dollars away from health care altogether to give tax reductions for very rich people. That's the tall blue bar to the far right in the diagram above.
The diagram is a bit misleading, because there are more people around the middle of the scale, and not many people have over $200K annual income. This means that the bars are not proportional to the amount of money being redistributed. Nevertheless, the diagram still looks like a Bizarro-world opposite to me, completely different from how it works in my home country. Instead of taking from the poor (who don't actually have that much because they are, you know, poor), the system could be designed take from those who are well off, the ones who can actually afford paying more, and give the rebates to the people who need it, like, you know, the people who make less than $20K per year?
Increasing the premium for health insurance by $1,420 for those who earn less than $10K means that they need to spend at least another 14% of their salary to maintain their coverage. Giving $600 to those who earn more than $100K saves them at most 0.6% of their salary, which I cannot imagine would make any kind of real world difference whatsoever. Finally, looking at the extreme to the far right (pun intended), reducing the cost by $5,640 for someone earning more than $200K saves them at most 2.8% of their salary. While that might be nice for them, it happens at the expense of low income households.
This is all backwards. This is all wrong. This is a redistribution of wealth as if imagined by Robin Hood's evil twin. Taking from the poor and giving to the rich is not how you create a working bill for universal health care. This bill is first and foremost a tax reduction for the very rich.
