Re: The PPACA Thread Part IV - Repeal & Replace, or Something...
Sorry, but its fantasyland thinking that the savings corporations get from not providing health insurance is going to back to the employees. Unless you mandate that as part of the law, you've been living in a different country than I have over the last 40 years. Bob and crew will be worse off and they'll get nothing and like it as judge Smails would say.
Agreed on either everybody does it, or nobody does it. My guess is nobody does it. There may be an occasional outlier. For example my employer gives 16 weeks off with full pay for maternity and paternity leave. That's far outside the norm, but its not costing them anything. This would be a huge boost to corporate profits. Boosts in corporate profits go to shareholders and executive management first and foremost, and to Bob last.
True dat, and I don't know whether anybody will seriously argue with you. When corporations act "nobly" by extending benefits they're not forced to, it's because at some level they
are forced to -- competition for scarce, high-skilled employees in the upper echelon of fields like medicine, tech, and science generally. That kind of carrot is still going to be extended no matter what the general health care climate is, and anyway those people aren't the ones hurting since ironically they actually
can pay out of pocket for their own care.
I see the logic in letting people who are covered by their employers have the option to keep their plans. As a rule, people hate change, and with something like health insurance and heath care they fear it for rational reasons. If you're doing OK in your row boat in shark-infested waters, you are afraid to let a hundred people swimming in the water into your boat (Obamacare) but you're equally afraid to leave your rowboat for a fancy new raft that can take everyone (Single Payer). Leave the rowboats alone while we launch the raft to pick up the vulnerable people.
It's true some of the sharks
are the insurance industry and the various other parasitic industries that have been built to exploit people's dread of the cost of illness. The health care insurance industry is basically a protection racket. As a practical first step, let people who are happy paying protection money keep doing it while we take care of those who can't make the payments.
We are in the 1860s and watching the development of fire departments. First they are private and obey profit motive considerations, only putting out fires at premium-payers' houses. The first thing to do is create a network of public, non-profit fire departments. Don't bother trying to pry people away from private sector firehouses -- eventually, that will either take care of itself or they will somehow actually manage to stay competitive in which case they aren't hurting anybody.
