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. Here’s one crying out for exposure: The bill encourages health insurance companies to pay their top executives
more.
It does so by removing the ACA’s 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.
The Institute for Policy Studies calculated in 2014 that the 10 biggest insurance companies had paid their top 57 executives a total of $300 million the previous year. Because of the ACA rule, they were able to deduct only 27% of the sum. Without the ACA, they would have been able to deduct 96%.
Here's the secret payoff to health insurance CEOs buried in the GOP Obamacare repeal bill