Report: Health Law Ups Taxes On Insurers With Big Pay Packages
By Julie Appleby
Kaiser Health News, August 27, 2014
While average compensation for top health insurance executives hit $5.4 million each last year (up from $5.1 million in 2012), a little-noticed provision in the federal health law sharply reduced insurers’ ability to shield much of that pay from corporate taxes.
As a result, insurers owed at least $72 million more to the U.S. Treasury last year, said the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank in Washington D.C.
Researchers analyzed the compensation of 57 executives at the 10 largest publicly traded health plans, finding they earned a combined $300 million in 2013. Insurers were able to deduct 27 percent of that from their taxes as a business expense, estimates the report. Before the health law, 96 percent would have been deductible.
UnitedHealth Group, which paid CEO and President Stephen Hemsley about $28 million in pay and stock options in 2013, had the biggest tax bill among the 10 companies, the report found. Hemsley’s compensation accounted for nearly $6 million of the firm’s estimated $19 million in taxes that the report says it owed on pay packages for five executives under the health law.
“They’re paying more in taxes just to protect these pay packages,” said Sarah Anderson, global economy project director at the institute.
Under the 2010 law, insurers can deduct only the first $500,000 of annual compensation per employee from corporate taxes, down from $1 million allowed before the law’s passage. The law also requires insurers to include so-called “performance pay,” such as stock options, which often represent a hefty portion of an executive’s pay.
http://capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org/index.php/2014/08/report-health-law-ups-taxes-on-insurers-with-big-pay-packages/
****
Covered California’s Peter Lee nets bonus, Obamacare site nets 1.2 million enrollees
By Chris Rauber
San Francisco Business Times, August 22, 2014
Covered California’s executive director, Peter Lee, has won a one-time $52,528 bonus for his role in launching the Obamacare exchange in the Golden State, which apparently netted 1.2 million enrollees all told during its first open enrollment period.
Lee’s one-time bonus is his first pay increase in three years… “excepting general state increases,” and represents a 20 percent “incentive award” based on his annual $262,644 salary.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/08/covered-californias-peter-lee-nets-bonus.html?page=all
****
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
There are a great many reasons that health care reform activists believe that private, investor-owned insurers should be eliminated from our health care financing, but one reason that is particularly offensive is the outrageous compensation packages for their executives. For that reason, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) included a provision prohibiting insurers from writing off for tax purposes more than $500,000 per executive, as a means to discourage the excessive executive pay.
Well, it didn’t work. Instead of taking those taxes out of the excessive salaries, executives were given pay increases averaging $300,000, raising their incomes to an average of $5.4 million. Although more corporate taxes were paid, those funds were recovered through higher premiums charged to the purchasers of health plans.
Compare the executive pay of the private insurers to that of Peter Lee, the head of California’s ACA insurance exchange – by far the largest and most successful ACA exchange in the nation. With his performance bonus, his income was only about one-twentieth of the average income of the executives of the largest publicly-traded health plans. In fact, Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group received almost 100 times as much as Lee.
These differences reflect the priorities of invested-owned corporations as opposed to quasi-public agencies. One is about making the most money possible, and the other is about serving the needs of the people.
Make no mistake. The ACA exchanges are still the wrong model because they contract with these same private insurers that perpetuate their abusive practices, such as overpaying their executives. Under a single payer system, administrators such as Peter Lee would be providing us with much greater value for their services since single payer systems eliminate much of the administrative waste while spending appropriate amounts for health care, and, yes, spending appropriate amounts for our public administrators.