Insurers pay more tax on executive compensation under Obamacare: study

When Washington eliminated corporate tax deductions on health indemnification executive emolument above $500,000 under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law in 2013, it engendered more than $72 million in supplemental tax revenue for the U.S. regime, a left-leaning cerebrate tank verbally expressed on Wednesday.

The report from the Institute for Policy Studies examined executive emolument in the 2013 proxy filings from WellPoint Inc and UnitedHealth Group Inc, among others, and found that those companies paid more taxes than they would have if the law had not been passed.

The study, indited by a team that fixates on executive emolument issues, provides a look into how much revenue the regime could raise if it eliminated this deduction more broadly.

After examining the 10 most immensely colossal publicly traded health insurers, it found that corporate taxes on their pay would likely increase in coming years because some 2013 emolument included stock options that predated the law.

Predicated on those disclosures, it calculated the corporate tax each company paid on the emolument of the top five executives versus what the companies would have paid predicated on the U.S. tax code that applied to insurers prior to 2013 and that perpetuates to be utilized by most other U.S. corporations outside of the health indemnification industry.

The report verbalized that if all corporations were to be taxed this way, it would raise $50 billion more in revenue for the U.S. regime.

"I do optically discern authentic momentum in applying this across the board," Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Project Director at the institute and a report author, verbally expressed. "The report shows that the firmament is not falling on these companies."

Health insurers have been at the center of the national healthcare reform law, which has set incipient benefit standards for coverage, transmuted regime payments for private Medicare benefits, expanded Medicaid to more income levels and engendered an incipient type of health indemnification for individuals.

The law additionally instituted limits on insurer profit and engendered incipient premium rate review procedures and taxes for insurers and corporations.

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for the indemnification industry's most astronomically immense lobbying group, America's Health Indemnification Plans, verbalized, "Requiring plans to pay higher taxes does nothing to make coverage more affordable or accessible."

The nation's most sizably voluminous health insurer, UnitedHealth, had the most astronomically immense vicissitude in corporate tax payments under the incipient rules, according to the report. It paid $19 million more in corporate taxes, predicated on a rate of 35 percent.

WellPoint lowered its 2013 corporate tax bill by more than $1.5 million by expediting the vesting of executive stock awards into tardy 2012 just afore the reform took place, the report verbalized. The company, which reported emolument on six executives in its proxy, paid about $10 million more in corporate taxes in 2013 than it would have under the old rules.