Jesus effin Christ. These shameless assholes.
This is the purely symbolic crap that makes me loathe the Democratic Party and almost as much Trump Republicans.
Sure there is a good case the CEO pay is out of control, and there are a variety ways of reducing them, including capping the deductible of CEO salaries.
However, what the hell is the case for singling out the deductibility of health insurance CEO as opposed to the CEO pay of booze, tobacco, payday lender, coal miner, etc?
The original BS rationalization is that ACA would bring lots of new customer to insurance companies and lots more customers and more profit. Customer yup profits probably not.
Did the CEO deductibility cap lower health care CEO compensation? There is no evidence it did.
Now, this would make sense if the ACA didnât fucking rewarding these same companies with billions of dollars in additional profits in the form of risk corridors.
Iâll skip a lengthy rant on risk corridors except for a few points. Early in an ACA thread, I mentioned that auto insurance in Detroit can run $10K/year for young male. It seems like a great opportunity for an insurance company to enter the market drive price down. (I assume that most young poor Detroit guys drive without auto insurance). If the insurance company is right they can make good money and if they are wrong they can write off their loss. Normal capitalism.
Now in the case of Health Insurance if company sees a market where premiums seem high they can enter the ACA exchange. If they are right they get to keep the profit. If they are wrong and they lose money, we the tax payers bail them out via the risk corridors.
How much have we spent on risk corridors, many billions but beyond that nobody know,s in part because there is a boat load of lawsuits.
How do companies know how much they loss in an ACA exchange?
Whatâs to prevent a company from claiming that due to new ACA customers and exchange requirement they needed a new IT system, and them putting the entire cost on the exchanges? Good question, probably the mostly the unhired staffers at HHS, or perhaps the IRS. Will they be hired? Not under the Trump hiring freeze no.
Risk corridors are crony capitalism at its absolute worse. It is fucking license to steal by the health insurance companies
So letâs do some math. Some HealthCare CEO makes $20 million a year, yup crazy amount The Republican repeal of that gave them 40% corporate tax rate * $20 milion = $8 million in additional profit. But the repeal of risk corridors cost the same insurance companies billions, or literally many hundreds of times more. Is there anybody surprised the Insurance companies oppose the repeal of ACA and the Republican?
(Now I donât for a second pretend there arenât some wonderful goodies for companies in the Republican plan, I just bet there are primarily lower tax rates for rich people).
There are lot of smart people on the forum, so I find really annoying when the get distracted by legislative squirrels.
Edit I forget all corporation are prohibiting for deducting CEO comp above $1 million (I thought that had rule had been sunseted) so the actual tax difference is ($1 million - 500K)*40% or $200K, to which is an amount smaller than mouse net in the context of health care debate.
https://twitter.com/benwikler/status/878080267671543809
So why donât Republicans address these problems? Thatâs a rhetorical question, I know the answer: They donât give a fuck, thatâs why.
Even if stipulating that the US âcanât affordâ rising medicaid costs, this âplanâ is about giving people who have more money than they can ever spend more money (that will, somehow, magically start âcreating jobsâ lolololol.) Republicans want to pay for those tax cuts with the lives of disadvantaged Americans who have no power and no constituency because they know they can win elections as a minority party with super pac money from a handful of ultra wealthy libertarians, voter suppression and gerrymandering, all the while keeping their mewling base placated and brainwashed with Pravda.
They are moving forward with Obamacare repeal because they believe their base will stick with them and that they donât need to pay too much attention to the protesters, this member of Congress said. Hereâs how this person thought about the recent barrage of calls his office has received:
The way I look at is there is no question weâre getting inundated with calls and emails and protests. There is all this energy and anger on the left. The people who lost are the ones who are angry. We won the entire elected government. So I remind my staff after a long day of hostile calls, it was less than six months we got more votes than a person on the other side in [my state]. The people who voted for me are still out there.
The people obviously voted against the rule of law and truth.
They said âwe want to get fucked over so rich people have more money because we love Wall Street.â
But Republican leaders believe that their voters are tribal enough, sufficiently walled off from information, that theyâll ignore the attack on their lives and keep voting R â indeed, that as they lose health care, get hit with crushing out-of-pocket bills, see their friends and neighbors face ruin, theyâll blame it on Democrats.
I wish I were sure that this belief was false.
I think the basis for this is that the Government is directly subsidizing the healthcare insurance company.
That is, if the insurance company REQUIRES government payment to keep it profitable while taking on the additional risk from certain patients, then perhaps they should dial back their CEOs compensation. I mean, half a million dollars per year isnât too shabby.
The government doesnât give out billions of dollars in payments to tobacco companies, or payday lenders, or mine operators.
Never say Republicans donât have a good heart for the donor class suffering from the draconian and oppressive 3.8% tax on investment income:
On this one, you can believe Nate Silver.
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This isnât a health care plan, itâs a tax cut.
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Mitch McConnell loves tax cuts
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This will sail on through, 51-50.
The only real negotiating going on right now is between Heller, Paul, Murkowski and Collins for who gets the two no votes.
This is really all that matters at this point. Everything else is theater. This is going to happen and we all need to shift to what we need to do about it, and not waste any more time with questioning how to stop it.
If any of you guys were thinking about getting cancer or typhoid or something, Iâd hold off on that for maybe eight years or so.
Of course itâs a tax cut.
The Republicans are incapable of building anything. They cut and close abecause itâs all they can do.
This doesnât address the fundamental problem of the exchanges - for-profit health care combined with mandatory entitlement means profits will shrink. Insurers are abandoning exchanges at a frightening pace, sped up post election by a feeling that the ACA is going to collapse anyway under a Republican administration. The ACA doesnât force insurers to participate the way it âstrongly encouragedâ the populace to participate and that flaw was probably going to erode them in the near term anyway. But instead of addressing that Republicans just intend to give tax breaks to the corporations. Itâs not even a pseudo principled disagreement itâs just pillaging money from the government.
Actually they do, tobacco farms (some of which are indirectly owned by tobacco companies) are eligible for crop subsidies. Coal mines benefit from the generous mineral depletion allowance as do I oil companies (full disclosure by owning master limited partnerships, I also get an oil depletion allowance tax break). I am not sure about any tax breaks/subsidies for payday loans but when you loan money at 300%+ a year maybe you donât need any more benefits.
Many/most defense contract operate on cost+ contract which is functionally identical to risk corridors and we donât put the silly $500K deduction on Defense contractor CEO.
Letâs be real this is purely a symbolic token gesture meant to make the Bernie bros other members of the liberal base feel good. It started under TARP where the deduction of bank CEO pay was restricted while they had TARP loans outstanding.
It pisses me of that seems to work, people get upset about ending an in ill conceived idea.that cost/saves millions/year will ignoring things like risk corridors that cost/save billions.
So. Earlier today Sen. Heller (R, NV) did a joint presser with Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, also a Republican, but a fan of the Medicaid expansion and proponent of the ACA.
Heller could have just said heâs a no vote âright nowâ, which is language weâre familiar with. Heller went way beyond that though, and really tore into the Senate bill, especially on Medicaid phase-out. Itâs hard to see him walking it back.
AndâŚit seems like his comments took the GOP by surprise. He may not have had a golden NO ticket from Mitch McConnell on this:
That seems like he ambushed them.
Now letâs be clear: the Senate bill is likely to pass by one vote.
If it magically does fail (Iâm skeptical), itâll be by way more than one vote. Thereâs no Republican senator from the last 20 years with the kind of spine to fail this thing by a single vote.
BUTâŚHeller just opened up a ton of space. If Capito, Murkowski, and Portman want to go NO on Medicaid reasons, they can, and that gives Cruz, Paul, and their hard-liners room to also go NO on âDoesnât go far enoughâ grounds, and fails this by a comfortable 10 or so.
I still think thatâs a long shot. But itâs more in play now than it was yesterday.
Well, I would mark the tax reductions as different, but I agree that the farms actually are similar if they get crop subsidies for tobacco. Tobacco only acounts for .2% of subsidies, but technically any other farm crop is the same.
Of course, I donât think most farmers are pulling in salaries of over $500k a year.
Risk corridors are there for a reason, despite not being paid back out as they were supposed to be, a completely separate problem which has been driven by congress as well. Are you proposing ditching the risk corridors/payments? What do you think will happen to riskier insured folks when that happens? Donât you think that will crash the insurance market as we know it, as there are BILLIONS of payments back to the insurance companies that are still outstanding?
Yup, they are a horrendously bad idea. They provide zero incentive to reduce health care, the decrease price transparency, and they are an open invitation for abuse. It is like the trifecta of stupid ideas, nicely disguised in a meaningless name ârisk corridorsâ WTF. If we called it by its rightful name corporate welfare for health insurances companies, in any other context (Defense, infrastructure, private prisons.) Democrats would be appropriately outraged.
If we donât reduce or at least control costs in America we are fucked. This is all a giant shell game trying to shift the cost from one group to another the Democrats to rich people, and future generations, and the Republicans to the states, and poor people. There is no way it ends well.
The independent health care market is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, the reason it doesnât work isnât complicated. The average America doesnât get $10,300 worth of benefits from health care. So when you ask them to pay for what it cost, they scream hell no. If you shift the burden to young people they rebel and if you ask older people to pay their true cost (Like AHCA does) they also rebel.
Now maybe if we had a system where if you couldnât pay we donâtâ treat you and we let you die on the street this might work (but I have my doubts.). But in America, thatâs not what happens. If you are sick we will treat you and worry about who pays for it after the fact.
This is why all the dire prediction of millions dying if the Republican Bill passes are wrong. There are many studies showing that there are minimal benefits to having health insurance For a simple reason, having health insurance doesnât mean you are going to get good health care and not having health insurance doesnât mean you wonât get good health care.
Instead of spending all this time and money on providing health insurance, we should be spending it on providing better health CARE for poor people, and risk corridors do nothing to accomplish that.
Where did you get the idea that the average American doesnât get 10,300 worth of benefits⌠what do you think theyâre getting, and how are you defining âaverageâ.