The ACA taxes include a 3.8% tax on investment income, which mainly goes to the top 1%. Investment income is not taxed to pay for Medicare or Social Security. There is also a 0.9% tax on individuals with very large salaries, which is also not taxed to pay for Social Security. Social Security taxes only tax the first $127,200 in earned income; any income above that or investment income is not taxed.

What this means is that eliminating the taxes for the ACA would provide the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of Americans an average tax cut of almost $200,000 a year, which would be almost 75% of the total dollar tax cut.

These ACA taxes on households raise about $100 billion a year, which along with ACA taxes on health insurance companies, drug and medical equipment manufacturers, and others, pay for ACA. One cost of the ACA are the premium tax credit where the federal government will reimburse low and middle-income households that purchase health insurance through a government exchange for all or part of their health insurance premiums. Another cost is the expansion of Medicaid for low-income Americans.

The elimination of the ACA and the premium tax credits which subsidize the government insurance exchange would cause dramatic losses for about 4% of the population, who would lose insurance subsidies that average almost $5000 each year. While most the poorest 20% of American households, earning less than $25,000 per year, would not see much of a loss in subsidies, they are the ones who are most likely to lose insurance with the elimination of the ACA and its expansion of Medicaid. Eliminating the Medicaid expansion could cause almost 11 million to lose their insurance.

It is no wonder that the wealthiest businesspeople and Wall Street tycoons who are represented by billionaire President-elect Donald Trump are so keen to eliminate the ACA. But their gains would come at the cost of higher health insurance premiums and loss of health insurance for millions of workers and small business owners.

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The large demand for health insurance that overwhelmed the federal as well as many state exchanges comes from the large number of people in the U.S. who have no health insurance. About 15%, or more than 45 million people, had no health insurance for all of last year according the newly released report on Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance in 2012. Oppressed nationalities (African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, Latinos and Native Americans) had even higher rates of going without health insurance, with the rate topping 30% for Chicanos and other Latinos.

The main reason for so many people going without health insurance is that businesses have been cutting health insurance benefits for their workers. In addition, the restructuring of the labor market to replace full-time, permanent jobs with more and more part-time and temporary jobs that intensified during the last recession also means fewer workers have health insurance. While young people have the highest rates of lacking health insurance, the biggest drop over the years have been among workers aged 25 to 64.

While the ACA promises to cover millions of Americans who lack health insurance, mainly through the expansion of Medicaid, which will be available in many, but not all, states to all low-income people. But millions more, including the 11 million undocumented in this country, will still not have health insurance even after the ACA is fully up and running.

The fundamental problem is that it is not profitable to insure everyone, and that for-profit health insurance spends about ten times as much for administration, profits for share-holders, huge salaries for CEOs, than government health insurance does. With the ACA based on forcing individuals to buy health insurance from private insurers through a combination of penalties (individual mandate) and subsidies, it actually expands this expensive and wasteful part of U.S. healthcare.

The example of Massachusetts, which pioneered a very similar plan to the ACA, shows both what this ACA can and can’t do. Massachusetts has the lowest rate of people without health insurance, at about 3%. On the other hand, Massachusetts is the most costly in terms of total health care spending, coming at 36% above the national average.

To both cover all Americans and lower costs, what is really needed is a single federal government health insurance, similar to Medicare, but available to everyone, also known as a single-payer system.

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Behind the partial shutdown of the federal government was the leadership of the House Republicans, who followed the lead of their right-wing Tea Party congress people. They needed to pass a bill to continue funding the government, since no budget for the 2014 Fiscal Year, which began Oct. 1, had passed. Instead, the House Republicans insisted on using the threat of a government shutdown to get what they wanted, which was to derail the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, even though the Senate, the president and the Supreme Court were against them.

The House Republicans’ willingness to seemingly burn down their own house to rid it of what they saw as vermin (Obamacare), is not only extremism, but also comes from their right-wing view of the government. It was under the Reagan presidency in the 1980s that the term “Starving the beast” arose, as right-wingers targeted the federal government as a “beast” for its social-welfare functions, wanting to pare down the role of the government to basically prisons to protect property rights of the rich and the military to maintain the empire.

Looking at a list of how agencies are being hit by the partial government shutdown, it is clear that many of the programs that the right wing hates will be hardest hit. Among the departments with the highest percentage of furloughed workers are the Department of Education (95%), Housing and Urban Development or HUD (95%), the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA (90%), and the Department of Labor (80%).

On the other hand, the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE, has only 15% furloughs, so one can expect the record deportations to continue. The Department of Justice, which includes the FBI, also has only a 15% furlough, so no let-up in spying and harassments of Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and anti-war and international solidarity activists is in sight.

While the House Republicans say that they are targeting Obamacare, by and large the rollout of the Affordable Care Act set for October 1 was unaffected. While there were long waits for web sites to load and phones to get answered, this was largely because nearly 3 million people flocked to the U.S. government web site www.healthcare.gov and more went to state web sites such as www.coverca.gov in California.

In contrast, Senate Democrats and the Obama administration value the role of the government, both to subsidize big corporations (as Obamacare does with big health insurance companies) and to maintain social peace through social welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare. But they also support the military and policing functions of the government, as seen in the Obama administration’s attempt to unleash a military attack on Syria and the FBI coordination of local police efforts to smash the Occupy movements.

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