He is making an indictment of the employer based health care which is pretty easy to do. One thing he misses, without a government mandate employers don’t have the burden he describes.
The alternatives to that are : market based consumer health care or socialized government run single payer health care, a medicare or medicaid for all. The first means each individual negotiating with a private health insurance company much like auto insurance, not a pretty option either. I don’t see voters going for that as they would have to compete with the massive medicare insurance pool which would crush them.
Not to worry, Obama-care leads to socialized medicare. It destroys the current system with all it’s mandates.
“One thing he misses, without a government mandate employers don’t have the burden he describes.”
The question is whether it really is a burden or not. I think the costs and regulations have finally tipped it toward “burden”, but it was not always so. For decades, this employer-provided benefit was a way to retain employees, and not in a good way. It took advantage of the employee’s fear of having a health problem while they were in the 6-month limbo of a waiting period before their new employer’s insurance would include them, or if they already had an existing condition whether they would be excluded by a new employer’s group plan. This improved employers’ bargaining position as a fearful employee is less likely to demand raises or threaten to leave for a better job.
The employee need never have been fearful if they had simply demanded more cash pay and maintained their own health insurance. The expanding cost and regulation involved, even before Obamacare, should by now make employers relieved to just give the employee a raise and get out of the health insurance business. Killing any sort of mandate on employers and encouraging employers to drop their group plans in lieu of higher wages should be elements of a conservative approach to lowering healthcare costs.