The practice persisted because employer paid health insurance is tax-deductible, while it isn't if a person pays it out of pocket.
The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.
Or make employer paid health insurance count as income and therefore not tax-deductible.
Typical accounts of employee compensation only measure wages and salaries. I've only seen the WSJ using total employee compensation, which is a far more realistic figure.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
"But where would the money come from" is one of the wildest questions to ask about a system that already costs double the average. I'd say, give or take, the same place its coming from now, but like, less.
i imagine its already doing the most expensive part, treating people who are almost dead who have lots of procedures that could be done.
picking up people that need basically no care sounds pretty cheap by comparison
Let's think through the implications of that.
The US healthcare system is non-functional for a month: what happens?
Hospitals and providers start running into cash flow problems and begin having difficulties providing service.
Fraud skyrockets because everything is getting blanket-approved because none of the data used for verification is available.
And about a month after that, people start dying from lack of care, after the last financial reserves of the system are exhausted.
Because that's the path the system was on when Change went down for several weeks, only averted by HHS/CMS saying 'Here's money, just do procedures, we'll worry about it later.'
Are you okay with 1000x as many people dying to make a point?
* You must pay the premiums with after-tax money.
* Your total qualified, unreimbursed medical and dental expenses (including premiums and costs like co-pays, deductibles, prescription medications, etc.) must exceed 7.5% of your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI).
* You can only deduct the amount of expenses that exceeds this 7.5% threshold.
* You must choose to itemize deductions instead of taking the standard deduction.
Most taxpayers use the standard deduction as it is often larger than their total itemized deductions.
Tax deductibility is only a very minor reason why most private insurance is employer provided; the much larger reason is that employment is a decent way to get a reasonably distributed group (of people generally healthy enough to work) and that’s one way of getting balanced risk pool if you’re not doing community rating or a societ wide pool.
From what I saw, the combination of "no exclusions for pre-existing coverage" and "penalty for not having health insurance" worked pretty well to balance the risk pools without nationalized healthcare.
I would still like nationalized healthcare, but I think there are other ways to fix the problem at hand of people being dependent on their jobs for healthcare.
Universal insurance could be better, and perhaps the day will even come when the American electorate recognizes priorities like this and candidates who will advance that kind of policy, contrary habits of the past notwithstanding.