so let's use the tax to punish everyone down to a level where they are getting crappy coverage. that sounds like your plan.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
As a matter of good tax policy, all income should be treated equally. If it were up to me, I would count all employer paid benefits as income. I would also count all government transfer payments as income. Broaden the base and reduce the rates.
On a parallel track, good health policy would shift us from third-party payment to individual control. Get the employers out of the loop. And again, if there is to be any subsidy at all (apart from the poor, who will have to be subsidized in any system), it makes no sense to award the subsidy arbitrarily, based on employer choices.
In general, the bigger the employer the higher the wages and the richer the benefit package. That's fine. But there is no reason to provide a tax-code distorting, health-system distorting regressive subsidy on top of that.
For the record, I now work for a large employer, am well paid, and have good benefits. I am goring my own ox here, but if we are serious about tax and health-care reform, we have to be willing to let the chips fall where they may.
For a similar set of reasons, we should phase out the home mortgage interest deduction (which is mostly an illusion anyhow). We wrongfoot ourselves if we complain about housing subsidies for the poor while receiving significantly greater subsidies ourselves. The only difference is that their subsidies are paid by HUD and ours are laundered through the IRS.