I believe the Senate bill will be the end of employer provided insurance as well....

[mike_c]

Or it could drive a stake deep into its heart, anyway. The most often cited rationale for employers providing insurance in the first place is the notion-- supported by data if I'm not mistaken-- that employee health increases productivity and profits, at least to a point. The point being the break even point, where those increases in productivity are offset by egregious increase in employee insurance costs, a point most businesses passed long ago.

But if the individual mandate passes, corporations will get to have their cake and eat it too. They'll get the covered work force whether they provide coverage or not because the law makes it the employee's responsibility to provide their own coverage if their employer elects not to. There will be few incentives left for employers to provide coverage if their savings from not providing it far outweighs the cost to them-- and the government will have transferred an obligation to pay that cost to the workers themselves.

Labor unions will grouse about it, of course, and some might even keep employer provided insurance alive, for a while, but as costs rise the same economic relationship will drive insurance costs closer and closer to the tipping point where paying them is not worth ANY gain companies might get from their labor contracts otherwise.

If that's not a stake in the heart of the last hope for health care for working people, I can't imagine a worse one.

[ShadDogPt]

1. Ya, and imagine the blowback because this happened on the Dems watch. NT

[OhioChick]

3. Yep. During a time of high unemployment, etc.....People are really paying attention. n/t

[inna]

2. that's my fear as well. rec#5

"There will be few incentives left for employers to provide coverage if their savings from not providing it far outweighs the cost to them-- and the government will have transferred an obligation to pay that cost to the workers themselves.
...
If that's not a stake in the heart of the last hope for health care for working people, I can't imagine a worse one."


Exactly.

I didn't have high expectations in the first place, but quite frankly, I did not expect such an outright, blatant, in-your-face betrayal from this administration and the Democratic majority.

[MadMaddie]

4. Ummmm if I am not mistaken the reason MANY US corporations

are moving jobs off-shore is because they claim that medical care is too expensive for employees. So they off-shore to cut costs. Corporations include healthcare costs as part of the calculation of an employees pay.

Here is another view, if a health care bill passes many companies won't have that ready excuse of why they are exporting US jobs. If there is a health care bill passed employers pay only the wages for an employee not healthcare.

Many corporations are already using HMO's to deny care to their employees. So how is an HMO better than a health care bill that could offer more choices of drs etc?

[mike_c]

5. kicking, just to see whether this thread has any life left....

Thanks for the recs!

[SoCalDem]

6. Employer-"offered" health insurance NEEDS to go away

That was a dumb (but necessary at the time) thing to ever do..and idiotic to continue it once wage & price freezes ended.

It created a system of indentured servitude, and drove wages DOWN..

millions of people are tethered to jobs they LOATHE because they need the damned insurance..

There's no way to even measure all the entrepreneurs who never got to "do their thing", because they could not afford to lose their helath insurance for the family.


a job should be just that.. pay to do a task.. it should be NONE of the boss' business what pills you take, how much you weigh (unless you are a flight attendant or acrobat), what your blood pressure is, whether or not you have any illness (unless it's communicable).

No employer should hold life & death in his/her hands, and no one should receive a death sentence along with a pink skip

[mike_c]

8. oh, I completely agree with you....

It's just that right now, there are two primary paths to possessing health insurance-- employer provided group insurance policies and personal, individual contracts with insurance providers. Most Americans rely on the former, if I'm not mistaken, and certainly most get the best value they're likely to get from group policies. My insurance costs me less than $100/month and it's decent, if not great. Buying the same policy myself would likely cost me more than ten times as much, and all my current health problems would be excluded as "pre-existing conditions," rendering the policy virtually worthless.

But that's the situation MANY more people will be in if a private mandate is included in any HCR bill. Without incentives to provide relatively inexpensive group coverage to employees, many more folks will find themselves paying much more for much less, especially if it is illegal to not do so.

One of the reasons I support single payer universal health care for all Americans, along the lines of the Canadian model, is that it solves that problem by both taking away the employer incentive to provide for-profit insurance AND protects citizens from having to bear the brunt of paying for vastly inflated health insurance costs that subsidize executive and investor profits first. I want publicly supported health care, period. But failing that, the individual mandate in the current HCR bills is an absolute disaster that will unfold over the course of a couple of years as corporations discover that they no longer have to bear the costs of insuring a healthy work force.

[Winterblues]

7. Well that's the only good part of the Bill I have heard so far.

There is no reason in Hell an employer should be responsible for an employees Health Insurance..No other business throughout the world has such a burden placed upon them. Only in America does business have such a burden and yet we want them to be competetive in the Global Economy..

[mike_c]

9. see #8....

I agree with you, but there needs to be a full public alternative to undercut the costs of insurance company profits.