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SD public defense duties shift from counties to state; SCOTUS appears skeptical of restricting government communications with social media companies; Trump lawyers say he can't make bond; new scholarships aim to connect class of 2024 to high-demand jobs.

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The SCOTUS weighs government influence on social media, and who groups like the NRA can do business with. Biden signs an executive order to advance women's health research and the White House tells Israel it's responsible for the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

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Midwest regenerative farmers are rethinking chicken production, Medicare Advantage is squeezing the finances of rural hospitals and California's extreme swing from floods to drought has some thinking it's time to turn rural farm parcels into floodplains.

Major Tax Breaks for Kentucky's Wealthiest Under AHCA

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Thursday, June 22, 2017   

FRANKFORT, Ky. – Kentucky's millionaires could see an average tax cut of close to $48,000 a year if the American Health Care Act (AHCA) becomes law, according to a new analysis.

Those tax cuts would be paid for in part by removing roughly 250,000 Kentuckians from health insurance rolls.

Alan Essig, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says data from the Congressional Budget Office confirms that the health bill that cleared the U.S. House is less about health policy than tax breaks for the top 3 percent of U.S. earners.

"The end result is 23 million people losing health care coverage,” Essig stresses. “The reason for that is to pay for $660 billion worth of tax cuts that overwhelmingly go to the wealthiest Americans."

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), low and moderate income Americans have been able to get coverage due to a tax on individuals making more than $200,000 a year, or $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

Supporters of the AHCA say cuts to Medicaid and reversing the program's expansion would reduce the federal deficit and lower health care costs.

Essig says the majority of Medicaid recipients who could be impacted by cuts would be the elderly, people with disabilities, pregnant women and children.

He adds that insurance premiums for an average 64-year-old with an income of $27,000 would rise from $1,700 to more than $16,000 a year.

Essig warns that bankruptcies due to medical bills, which have gone down under the ACA, or Obamacare, could be back on the rise.

"Real people will end up losing their health care coverage, and that will impact people's health, people's lives and people's bank books,” he states. “We're going to be going back to where we were, which I don't think is where anyone wants to go."

The U.S. Senate has not yet made its version of the health bill public, and has promised to bring it to a vote before the July recess.




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