> The way to protect workers is to shift the burden of health care and other costly benefits onto the government, supported by taxes
Yes, it's clear that our prosperity hinges on how quickly we decouple health care from our employers.
Employers don't want to be in the business of providing healthcare to their employees and its painfully obvious.
I just don't understand why smart people think it's a good idea for anyone other than me decide what my healthcare needs are!
I would like to have a separate discussion whether the government is the best party to handle this. If you look for my writing here and on Quora, you will see that I have for over a decade being campaigning the government was the best party, but after having really worked on it (thanks to people getting in touch with me from my writing), I no longer believe the government is the best partner.
Instead, I think the government managed marketplace where people choose private insurance is actually a brilliant solution and ACA already provides that, so we already have that in place.
The value the government brings here is extreme negotiating ability with the private insurance providers that individual citizens lack.
> The US public does not want this
I strongly disagree.
I have spoken with far too many (thousands) of people to know that majority of the U.S. hate their employer provided insurance and are worse off for it. I can give you specific instances where an employee was worse off due to the employer provided insurance and had to declare bankruptcy due to medical bills than if they were unemployed to begin with and were on welfare instead!
I seriously believe:
1. the tax incentives to provide employer provided insurance should be abolished. They made sense at a time that's past us now.
2. employers instead should be required to pay a premium for choosing to provide primary insurance to employees instead of letting employees continue with the coverage they have or get one from the marketplace
3. Employers are free to provide secondary and supplementary care insurance if they chose to, not due to regulation.
This leaves behind only those employers who genuinely care about their employees instead of pretending to do something because someone forces them to.
I support the individual mandate in the ACA because it ensures negative self selection in the marketplace.
This will allow people to gain control of their own healthcare, get a benefit package that's more transparent and gain better control of their own lives.
As software engineers, we are in the top tier of employment. We earn in the top tier of the population and handle levels of complexity in the top tier of the population.
Our personal experiences don't reflect that of the general population.
Even then, the engineer making $180k/yr at Microsoft might have a very different healthcare experience compared to the engineer making $180k/yr at Google depending on the choices that the benefits administrators at Microsoft and Google have made!
That's just insane and a level of complexity that's just unnecessary.