Health care insurance needs to be removed from the employment system.

[Skidmore]

If they want a free market, then the Rw and big bidness needs to get one. Let every insurance company have to compete for the real incomes of people, not an inflated income as contained in the gross compensation people see on paper. Let doctors and other health care services compete for those dollars to with fair pricing, not those tied to a gamed system of third payers. Let unions negotiate for living wages using productivity instead of gambling with healthcare for some and ignoring the general population.

I think a lot of pricing will come down from the stratosphere when you are dealing in real incomes and not just funny money.

[EFerrari]

1. I wonder how many working people actually have insurance through their job

that they can even afford to use. :shrug:

[Cleita]

4. Probably those who still have union jobs, but even they are paying more

for fewer actual benefits.

[Skidmore]

5. If you are working less than 35 hrs. per week you aren't or if your

employer is a small business who is exempted from providing it you aren't. If you are a small business owner, you can't likely afford it for yourself.

It's a freaking racket of Madoff proportions. Put in place by Congress, corporations, and finance industries.

[EFerrari]

6. Both my husband and I worked fulltime in the 70s

and we had "insurance" we couldn't afford.

It is a racket.

[laughingliberal]

2. Absolutely! Employer based health care is one more way we remain enslaved to the corporations

unable to leave jobs we hate, unable to start one of those 'small businesses' the politicians profess to love so much and all the points you mentioned. Rec 100%.

[Cleita]

3. I totally agree. It's no longer a viable way to do this. n/t

[endless october]

7. yep. no more "group" bullshit.

one group. all of us.

[aquart]

8. So I keep saying.

[ipfilter]

9. Employer paid insurance premiums should be converted to wages.

That would increase the tax base to help pay for HCR and boost the economy at the same time. But I'm just a dreamer so what do I know.

[KamaAina]

10. You're absolutely right. Do you know how the two got entangled in the first place?

It's a relic of WWII-era wage and price controls. See, back then, since wages were frozen, the only way co.'s could compete for top management was through bennies. And do you know where I learned this? From the pResidential campaign of Mike Freakin' Huckabee. :scared:

Later unions got on board, started negotiating them into contracts, and the practice spread through the middle class. And now in the post-Reagan union-busting era, most of us are lucky to have anything at all.

[izzybeans]

11. Every conservative should be against employer sponsored health insurance

for the same reasons they are against "government run healthcare". The difference, though, is their argument that "it" is coercive is only really true of employee sponsored health care. I usually tell my libertarian friend that his argument against government action is a mirror image of the true coercion and lack of power he has at work. It's a form of projection. Just as hating a representative democracy is a form of self-hatred.

I'd prefer that my entire compensation package come in the form of dollar bills (even electronic versions of them). And I'd prefer the taxes taken out of my new found take home compensation buy me into Medicare For All.