Started back in WW2 when the government restricted the ability for employers to offer higher salaries, so employers offered additional compensation to employees outside of salary. That coupled with today's tax incentives have made it stick.

This is the core problem in the United States. The second is increased housing costs in many locations leading to renting vs ownership in many cases (this is easier fought currently by moving).

The two attributes together tie most people into some degree of modern indentured servitude for the very wealthy--there just happen to be many layers in between people and the extremely wealthy trying to obscure that fact.

Yes, there is a degree of freedom of choice but employment policies converge to benefit employers across industry so the choice is between an red and yellow apple.

Agree 100%, if just to stop that element of job anxiety alone. Lose your job, lose your coverage (unless you want to get plowed on COBRA) is a high-risk way to operate.

It should be disconnected from _employer_. Whether it’s disconnected from _employment_ is a different question. Some countries cover everyone regardless of employment status, others depend on employment status but isn’t tied to a particular employer. Obviously one is preferred over the other but both are better than health tied to a particular employer.

Really just an excuse to not have any insurance. "Oh, but what about the stress on employers" copout. We all pay for someone if they have a medical emergency, it's a matter of being a citizen, and you know, alive.

As a Canadian, this aspect of the United States health care "system" (if you can call it that) has always baffled me: for a country that blasts its love of capitalism to the whole world, and emphasizes its past revolutionary actions against the old world of aristocrats and monarchs -- this is a glaringly _feudal_ model of health care delivery.

Having employees depend on their lord^H^H^H^Hemployer for their very physical existence... how medieval.

I agree with you, but how do you address the counterargument that financing health care requires pooling funds at some level, and a company is a logical place to do that seeing as how they have an interest in having everyone come to work on time?

I totally agree, but unfortunately, the very origins of that issue lies squarely in the very cause for why these types of things cannot be solved, because the authoritarian paternalistic types who think they helping just keep making the Gordian Knot bigger and more convoluted instead.

You are looking at it wrong (to be direct). You can get all the health insurance disconnected from employment you want just like any other self-employed and independently affluent people get. It's there, freely available to you. No one is stopping you. Ironically, you can even get that insurance when you are employed, even though you will literally pay a massive penalty for being employed by doing so in the form of the unrealized and hidden cost of the un-utilized employer contribution to the health care cost, which you would then have to pay out of pocket on top of that. (tip, if you want to decouple health insurance from employers, go for the tax advantages of providing health insurance plans ... which touches on the origins of this damn mess caused by the do-gooders fools that demanded employers provide health care in the past).

The real problem is a perception issue that people do not understand the true nature and cost of health insurance/care which also leads them to not understand that their employer puts up many times more in health insurance costs than the premiums the employee pays every month. The problem is a perception problem, and a health care cost problem at its core, and the employment dependency issue is really just a secondary issue that is utterly meaningless.

What does it matter whether you could sever and ban employers from even offering health insurance under a glorious socialist authoritarian regime while racing towards communist demise? Does it matter whether you pay $200 and your employer pays another $700 every month in premiums, or instead your employer simply just adds another $700 to your paycheck per month and you pay the full $900 for health insurance every month out of pocket? All other things being equal, I argue it's the same thing, because math.

Reality is that it's a cost issue that directly is derived from a corruption issue. For example, before the government committed fraud, aka, stole, and handed the health sector (insurance and care) trillions of dollars in profits through the ACA, aka Obamacare, (do not believe me, confirm it yourself if it makes you uncomfortable that I am questioning your messiah Obama, just look at the health sector stock market pre and post ACA [1]), which is one of the sources of corruption that has driven the cost of health care up from (single person example) ~$100/$500 employee/employer split cost for health insurance before ACA to ~$200/$700 post ACA.

The other corruption that has been driving up health care costs and therefore defrauding people is (which his true, regardless of whether one is able to accept it or not) due to the millions of "immigrants" both "legal" and illegal, that have been transported into the USA to defraud the American citizens that are part of the 99%, which put massive amounts of load on the health system with ailments, diseases, and conditions; many of which were essentially unknown and/or eradicated in the whole of the western world before just a few years ago.[2 (which is not quite the full extent but a thread that can be pulled on if one wants] When citizens who are being financially enslaved to pay for the health care of millions of "immigrants" from the third world with degenerative diseases and conditions, it is going to cost and that cost will always be and it is going to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions per individual. And no, that is not an exaggeration. The information can be relatively easily uncovered even though I do not have the ability to pull it up right now for citation.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2016/07/28/overwh...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2018/02/26/how-am...