Posted on 04/02/2010 3:35:29 PM PDT by Signalman
With President Obama still glowing over last week's passage of health-care reform, it's a good time to ask why American businesses ever began providing health-care coverage, and especially prescription drug benefits, to begin with. Out of all industrialized nations, only the United States has tied employment to health care and retirement coverage.
Incredibly, our health-care system is an outgrowth of 1950s union-busting efforts. That's right: Carmakers didn't want unions to form their own benefits co-ops. So they instead provided the very health care and retiree coverage that ended up destroying them.
Of course, from the moment health-care benefits became a part of employee compensation, they also became a bargaining chip and a distraction from the work at hand.
There's no better example of this than the complex employer-based prescription drug programs that were created under Medicare Part D, and which is now the cause of so much handwringing and billion dollar write-offs by some of the largest companies in America.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
As if it’s a good thing that everyone will lose this benefit in the free market system, and shift the cost to the federal government tax burden. Just incredible.
So we went from : “You can keep your current plan” to
“Why the F did we ever let you have that plan?!”
Communists/Socialists/Liberals are absolutely insane.
CNN deceitful propaganda.
Companies should be free to offer health insurance (or anything else) as a perk of employment.
But that doesn’t give the government (State or Federal) the right to regulate such perks ... much less claim that employement perks are a ‘right’.
What next? Free parking less than 100 yards from the door is a ‘right’?
It goes back to WWII. The government price and wage controls prevented companies from offering higher wages to attract needed new employees but did permit companies to offer Health Plans so companies competed for labor with their health plans.I don’t like to call it insurance because it isn’t insurance except in the case of “catastrophic” coverage. For the most part what we call medical insurance is a medical services pre and perpetual payment plan that, along with an insane tort system and government medicine- medicare and caid, triples the actual cost of Medicine.
My understanding was that employer based healthcare plans were an outgrowth of wage controls during WWII, not some union busting effort.
Simply not true. The benefit started because during WWII there were wage controls, and the automakers were barred by law from increasing wages. To get around the prohibition, the automakers started providing none cash benefits, one of which was health insurance.
According to CNN, the gov't health care legislation will make America more productive because health care will no longer be a distraction. What CNN fails to tell us is that with longer lines, a sick person will be off work extra days because they will have to wait to see a doctor.
You got it! That is what I learned from my parents.
I never heard of health insurance until I had to sign a labor contract with it in 1960.
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