jonathan, thank you so much for joining us. thanks for having me. this is a long ruling. as i said earlier we just got it. have you had a chance to digest it? and can you explain to us what this means? like everyone else, i saw this when it came out an hour and a half ago. so this is my first reaction. you know, the basic journalist is that the judge said look, when they wrote the affordable care act, they had this mandate penalty and the rest of the pieces of it needed the mandate to work. so if you take the mandate out, congress clearly intended for these pieces to work together. now that the mandate penalty doesn t exist anymore because they got rid of it in last year s tax cut, we got to throw out the whole law. even people who oppose the affordable care act, the lawyers who filed the previous lawsuits have said they think this argument is just ridiculous. and here s the reason. the premise of his argument is that we have to listen to what congress said. congress wrote this l
now we ve taken one piece out, the whole thing has to go. well, you know, congress revisited the issue in 2017. we were all there. we saw it when they proposed taking the mandate out, the debate came up. gee, that s going to affect the rest of the health care law. and the republican congress said yeah, we know that. we re going to debate. we re going to take out this mandate penalty anyway. they made that decision. we know what congress thought in 2017. they changed their mind. congress is allowed to do that. for the judge now to go and say well, i m going to just ignore all that i m going to good become to what they did in 2010, that is it s an audacious act of a judge basically substituting his interests for the rest of the country. isn t it the case that the original way the law was written also intended for every single state to take advantage of the medicaid expansion. but as far as i recall, the supreme court ruled that no, states can opt out because many states have. florida
obamacare is not repealed. the president s statement was not accurate. the tax bill zeroes out the mandate penalty for noncompliance with the coverage requirements. in other words, people who choose to go uninsured now can remain, don t have to pay a penalty. every other aspect of obamacare is still law. 20 million people are covered by it and those people can keep their coverage without much changing. aspects of the law that remain on the books right now, hundreds of billions of dollars to buy coverage, medicaid expansion for states that chose to take that up and have the federal government take cost. young adults can remain on the policy. insurance policies have to do that and insurers can no longer turn away and charge people more for preexisting conditions. republicans have not been able to repeal those items because they are popular. the president was correct about one thing. individual mandate was popular.
really be affected by this. and in fact, of the entire individual market, it is really the unsubsidized group middle class upper middle class folks who will be impacted by premium increases that will result from eliminating the mandate penalty. can you explain that more? because peter alexander was trying to get to this point in the white house briefing room yesterday with sarah sanders raising the question that with this tax cut bill, there will be some people whose health insurance premiums will rise because of the repeal of the individual man date. explain that. reporter: sure. so first what happens is because of the repeal, presumably some folks who are now buying insurance who don t feel they really need it, you know, they are not seriously ill with lots of predictable expenses will decide since there is no penalty, they won t buy the insurance. and that is particularly going to be folks who are unsubsidized. as a result, we ll see healthier
let me take you through some of the top headlines ch first on the tax brackets, the number stays the same at seven as it is. and the lowest rate is at 10%, but check out the dif enss among the others. it lows the rate e ifs most of them. especially check out the top individual rate. that drops from 39.6% to now 37%. on the corporate tax rate, it drops from 35% to 21%. that s significantly, lightly higher than the 20% proposed in the house and senate bill and that would is start up in 2018. very significantly, the bill does include an elimination of the obamacare mandate penalty. that s significant because it was in the senate bill. something that wasn t in the house bill. certainly, there is a considerable more in the 503 pages just released tonight. but republican leaders are confident. they are pushing ahead. certainly a big win for them to