quote:

ORIGINAL: Stephann

quote:

ORIGINAL: toservez

quote:

We can't afford not to.  As it is, by cultural mandate, we grant upper level workers healthcare as part of their compensation package (how that happened, is really a long story.)  For an employer, it's just another expense of doing business; not unlike the payroll tax.  Once upon a time, working for a company meant having health insurance.  Today, working for a company barely means having a job; my current job employs me as a 'sub-contractor' and doesn't even pay payroll tax (meaning it'll all come out of my pocket.)  It's hardly a minimum wage job, either.

I think the solution will be to shift a good portion of the healthcare burden onto employers.

That is not accurate. The burden of the costs of the healthcare system has always been and still is on employers and the costs have gone so high over the past couple of decades that the employers have gone no more. Is there greed on their level of course, but when premiums increase exponentially higher then average inflation year in and year out which means employers cannot pass it along to their own customers then their burden has become too much. To this day outside of retires, employers pay for the major majority who have insurance and pay a majority of the premium of those employees. Most of the increase in employees paying parts of the premium or not offering up health insurance to employees is historically because the burden became too high not because they saw a chance to squeeze a few dollars.

Again there are of course greedy employers who design ways to not pay employees insurance but it is ignorance to think that they all do it out of greed because it is well documented that the price of health care for an employee as a percent was and is now is far different. Employers historically are not opposed to paying health insurance to their workers. They just in the present time can no longer want or can pay what the insurance industry is sticking them up for.

The problem is if no one controls the costs, and currently the healthcare industry there is no one really involved that has a reason to, then no system will be an answer.

My apologies if I didn't state my position clearly enough.  I was suggesting not that the cost of health insurance be simply another payroll tax.  I was saying the burden of administration of health care should fall on employers.  This is why I suggested a federal minimum wage increase; essentially saying that those who aren't receiving adequate health care, would in fact be those earning minimum wage.  Thus a federal increase in the amount that workers are required to receive will, understandably and eventually, drive up the costs of goods and services, and temporarily increase inflation.  But the trade off is that the workers who are not receiving adequate health insurance will be 'given' insurance (the cost of the wage increase offset by the cost of the insurance.) 

Obviously, it's just one way of saying "we need to federally require health care for all of our citizens."  I strongly oppose an expansion of the medicare, medicaid programs, or SSI; we don't need another federally instituted failure.

In saying we need to require health care, we're saying someone needs to pay for it.  Nobody likes to dig in their pockets, but something this large (and indeed, something that every American would be taking advantage of) every American needs to pay for what they take out of the pot.

Stephan