Reply #35: Employer-based health insurance chains workers to their job

[krispos42]

That's one big issue. If you or a family member get a "condition", then if you change jobs or strike out on your own you lose coverage for that condition for a period of time, or perhaps permanently. It depresses wages and stunts entrepreneurship.

It raises car insurance rates; fully a third of my car-insurance cost is for coverage for my passengers and anybody that I hit.

It's a burden to small businesses. They pay higher rates than big businesses because they have less bargining power.

It's a non-innovative industry. Non-innovative industries (like, say, making paper clips or AM/FM radios or light bulbs) don't make massive profits, pay massive executive salaries, and have double-digit annual price increases unless they are exploiting a monopoly situation. And a non-competitive monopoly system is the antithesis of the free market. If it's a non-innovative, non-competitive, critical industry, then it should be run by the government if the private sector can't do it without raping the consumer.

It's 16% of our GDP covering about 80% of the people. It should be about 10%, covering all of our people. It's not, so you have to ask where that other 6% of the GDP goes. Well, it goes into a corporate bureacracy that deliberately makes the system hidiously complicated then charges enormous sums of money for the complexity. It's like a giant cost-plus contract for Bechtel.

The insurance companies with their massive profits then have massive influence into our governmental system, distorting it, minimizing the voice of the people and amplfying the voice of corporations. That's not democracy.