The House Health Care Reform Bill Less Expensive than Bush’s Tax Cuts

According to a new report by the Citizens for Tax Justice, current health reform efforts–which have an expected price tag of around $1 trillion for ten years–will cost significantly less than Bush’s tax cuts, which cost an estimated $2.5 trillion over the same period.

As the report notes:

“[M]any of the lawmakers who argue that the health care reform legislation is “too costly” are the same lawmakers who supported the Bush tax cuts. Their own voting record demonstrates that health care reform is not a matter of costs, but a matter of priorities.

“It’s difficult to see how the Bush tax cuts could provide us with two and a half times the benefits of health care reform. In 2010, when all the Bush tax cuts are finally phased in, a staggering 52.5 percent of the benefits will go to the richest 5 percent of taxpayers. President Bush and his supporters argued that these high-income tax cuts would benefit everybody because they would unleash investment that would spark widespread economic prosperity. There seems to be no evidence of this, particularly given the collapse of the economy at the end of the Bush years.”