This week, Senate Republicans announced that they plan to pay for their tax cuts for large corporations and millionaires not only by imposing tax increases on the middle-class but also by undermining people’s access to health care. Specifically, they have proposed eliminating the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual mandate, which helps keep premium costs affordable by ensuring that both healthy and sick people have health insurance.

Repealing the mandate would drive up premiums by 10 percent in 2019 and lead to 13 million fewer people having health insurance by 2025. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report also revealed that the similar House version of the tax bill would result in $25 billion in cuts to Medicare in fiscal year 2018 and hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts to the program overall. Taken as a whole, the tax bill would not only increase taxes for millions of middle-class families but would also have disastrous effects on people’s health care.

A typical middle-class family buying individual market insurance would see premiums increase nearly $2,000