Labor & Employment Law

Health Care CEOs Pocket Big Bucks, Still Fight Real Reform

By James Parks

Republicans on Capitol Hill want to keep the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich. Never mind the nation lost nearly 8 million jobs under the Bush administration when the tax breaks were in place.

Now, Ezra Klein points out why the corporate-backed Republicans  support tax breaks for the wealthy. Klein pulled together a chart comparing how much of a break each taxpayer would receive under President Obama?s tax plan and the Bush plan. For taxpayers who make $1 million a year or more, the tax break under the Bush plan is 16 times as big as it is under the Obama plan ($103,835 vs. $6,349).  

Some of the people who got those huge tax breaks are the CEOs of health care companies. According to a new study by Health Care for America Now (HCAN),  while most people struggled to pay health care premiums, the CEOs of the nation?s health care companies made nearly $1 billion last year?enough to pay for every resident of Philadelphia, Dallas and Minneapolis combined to go to their regular doctor for an office visit. Read the report here.

The same insurance companies that lavished their CEOs with these exorbitant salaries are now fighting a behind-the-scenes battle to make even more money by circumventing the new health care reform law, HCAN reports. The new health reform law includes a provision that requires insurers to spend on patient care at least 80 percent of health plan premiums collected from individuals and small employers and 85 percent of premiums paid by large employers.

“The insurance companies and their army of lobbyists are doing everything they can to undermine this law,” says HCAN Executive Director Ethan Rome.

 To feed their greed, they are pressuring regulators to change the very definition of what is “medical care” so they can ignore these important new requirements and trump Congress.  

So, health care execs get big salaries and huge tax breaks. But instead of creating new jobs with their money, they are trying to find ways to sock it to the rest of us.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on August 13, 2010 (boomark / email).