In Shocking News, Scott Walker’s Health Care Plan Screws the Poor

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This is going to be the most anticlimactic blog post ever, but can you guess how Scott Walker’s health care plan compares to Obamacare for the poor? And how it compares for the upper middle class and the wealthy?

Damn. You guessed. But just to make it official, here are a couple of charts that show how the subsidies in the two plans compare at different income levels. I used the Kaiser calculator to estimate Obamacare subsidies and Walker’s written document to calculate tax credits under his plan. The chart on the left shows a 3-person family with 30-year-old parents. The chart on the right shows the same thing with older parents.

And have no fear: I chose $30,000 as the minimum income level because most families below that level qualify for Medicaid. And you guessed it: Walker’s plan slashes Medicaid too. So the poor and the working class get screwed by Walker no matter what their income level is.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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