Ways and Means Committee Republicans have passed a part of their Obamacare replacement allowing insurers to deduct more executive pay from their taxes, nine hours into a marathon hearing stretching into Wednesday night.
The Affordable Care Act says health insurance companies can deduct from their taxes only $500,000 of the pay of each top executive, even though the cap is typically $1 million for other corporations. The lower cap was intended to discourage insurers from paying their executives increasingly high salaries.
The replacement plan backed by House GOP leadership would remove the cap, presumably returning it back to $1 million. No Democrats voted for the provision, calling it a “giveaway” to insurance executives.
“What we have here to kick off this discussion and this markup is the beginning of a huge giveaway to the very, very wealthy,” said Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich.
Republicans argued that the lower cap discriminated against insurers over other industries and didn’t prompt them to lower prices, anyway.
The measure is just the first of five sections in the GOP bill the Ways and Means Committee will consider.
