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Here's the secret payoff to health insurance CEOs buried in the GOP Obamacare repeal bill
[font size="3"]Consumers across America should know that when they pay their hard-earned dollars to cover the soaring cost of premiums, they are not just chipping in to pay for the CEOs next new yacht, said then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).[/font]http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obamacare-ceos-20170307-story.html
Concealed within the 123 pages of legislative verbiage and dense boilerplate of the House Republican bill repealing the Affordable Care Act are not a few hard-to-find nuggets. Heres one crying out for exposure: The bill encourages health insurance companies to pay their top executives more.
It does so by removing the ACAs limit on corporate tax deductions for executive pay. The cost to the American taxpayer of eliminating this provision: well in excess of $70 million a year. In the reckoning of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank that analyzed the limitation in 2014, that would have been enough that year to buy dental insurance under the ACA for 262,000 Americans, or pay the silver plan deductibles for 28,000.
As part of an effort to rein in soaring executive pay, the ACA decreed that health insurance companies could deduct from their taxes only $500,000 of the pay of each top executive. Thats a tighter restriction than the limit imposed on other corporations, which is $1 million per executive. The ACA closed a loophole for insurance companies enjoyed by other corporations, which could deduct the cost of stock options and other performance-based pay; for insurance companies, the deduction cap is $500,000 per executive, period.
The idea was to signal that the ACA, which cemented health insurance companies into the center of American healthcare, wasnt a pure giveaway to the industry.
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Here's the secret payoff to health insurance CEOs buried in the GOP Obamacare repeal bill (Original Post)
Bill USA
Mar 2017
OP
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)1. These suckers can run but they can not hide.
Most of us assumed it was all about Tax Cut for the Wealthy from the get go. Facts have real consequences.
subterranean
(3,427 posts)2. It will also remove the restrictions on medical loss ratio.
Under the ACA, insurance companies have to spend at least 80% of premium dollars on paying for health care. The repeal will eliminate that requirement, giving them incentive to deny claims as much as possible. That means more money for executive bonuses and shareholder dividends - which is the real purpose of insurance companies.
Bill USA
(6,436 posts)3. That's worth a helluva lot to insurance companies. They can hide loads of profit in G&A!