I bet employers are wishing they never got involved in benefits. Now they're just the governments execution arm for social programs and they're stuck forever.
Looking back, the only reason employers started getting involved in Healthcare was because the 1942 Stabilization Act restricted them from raising wages and they had to come up with a more creative way of competing for talent.
Now the ACA forces companies to privide insurance by law. Under Biden's Covid plan they're now going to be the execution arm for vaccine mandates. It's crazy to think that to start a business you need to almost immediately be prepared to be a federal government franchisee.
Considering those same employers also get massive subsidies for every kind of self-inflicted damage, which results in massive C-suit cash-outs and buy-backs, this is the least the commons could hope for.
I guess I was thinking more about small to medium sized businesses. A business with 50-100 employees has to enforce government social programs but there won't be any c-suite golden parachutes.
I wish more people realized how anti-capitalist the current healthcare system is in the U.S.
If you want to encourage business, then remove barriers. Governments should be taking care of healthcare, not businesses.
Businesses should be focused on the core work they do: Running their business. Not on providing health care.
(Same goes, really, for childcare, transportation, and similar benefits that large employers sometimes offer, often because these things are not effectively provided by the government.)
Completely agree. Universal healthcare would empower a lot of entrepreneurs, make it easier to attract talent for smaller companies, and free me of a completely ridiculous amount of paperwork and oversight each year. If someone told me, as a business, I could just pay a tax and know my employees had access to the same quality of care as everyone else, I'd sign up in a heart beat.
Most of those seem decent [1] but mostly related to reducing taxes on income you put into the government social program instead of letting you invest somewhere else. Not sure employers would see the tax breaks as enough justification if they weren't forced.
My point is that it didn't used to be a law. Why can't the government enforce it's own social program and let businesses focus on their primary goal instead of healthcare compliance.
> It's found the most efficient/popular way to do that is through businesses.
Not at all, look up the history of health insurance in America, companies providing it was not by design, it was in fact done to get around government laws on wage caps during the great depression.
Now days the system is entrenched, there are a large # of corrupt players who leech of the healthcare ecosystem in America, and they pay good $ to lobbyists and PR firms to keep things that way.
Right now 1/3rd of health care costs go to working out billing. That type of insane inefficiency would not be tolerated in a true capitalist marketplace. Imagine if Visa charged 33% commission on every sale and then had a law passed saying all purchases had to be done with a Visa card! That'd be an insane drag on the economy, America's GDP would plummet.
But we literally accept that exact scenario with health care costs. (Except for cosmetic procedures, which have a competitive market that has driven technology forward and prices down!)
Looking back, the only reason employers started getting involved in Healthcare was because the 1942 Stabilization Act restricted them from raising wages and they had to come up with a more creative way of competing for talent.
Now the ACA forces companies to privide insurance by law. Under Biden's Covid plan they're now going to be the execution arm for vaccine mandates. It's crazy to think that to start a business you need to almost immediately be prepared to be a federal government franchisee.