The House proposal to repeal the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) and replace it with the American Health Care Act (AHCA), provides only a tiny fraction of very wealthy West Virginians tax cuts while reducing the number of Americans with health coverage by an estimated 24 million. The two big tax cuts included in the AHCA are the repeal of taxes on investment income and earned income, both of which only apply only to people who make over $200,000 a year. These taxes were enacted to pay for the ACA’s health care expansions, including Medicaid in West Virginia that has provided insurance to over 170,000 West Virginians.
In West Virginia, 96 percent of the benefit from repealing these two taxes would go to the wealthy top 1 percent of West Virginians. Only 11,063 West Virginians, or 1.2 percent of taxpayers in the state, according to a recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), would benefit from cutting these taxes. The average tax cut in West Virginia for the estimated 11,063 taxpayers impacted would be $5,239. The other 922,000 taxpayers in the state would receive no benefit.
Nationwide, the tax cuts would total $31.5 billion. Of that, only 0.15 percent would go to taxpayers in West Virginia, roughly $46 million.
Below are the state-by-state figures for more information on who benefits from these proposed tax cuts:
