Buying insurance through your employer should be illegal.
What if my employer made me buy the car insurance he likes?
Or the homeowner insurance?
Exactly. Employer insurance was started as a perk to replace cash compensation.
No, FORCING you to buy insurance through your employer should be illegal.
Buying insurance through your employer should be illegal.
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But it isn’t depending upon many factors.
...Under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare or healthcare reform),
applicable large employers are mandated to offer full-time employees
qualified and affordable health insurance coverage. If they do not,
employers may pay a tax penalty called the Employer Shared Responsibility Payment.
It sounds complicated (and yes, some of the calculations for understanding
FTE and the fee are quite complicated), but the concept is fairly simple.
https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/an-employee-declined-our-company-health-insurance
Few people realize that the reason companies offer great insurance supplement plans to Medicare for around $30/month is because the government run Medicare subsidizes them to the tune of about $800 per person per month.
An honest insurance salesman will tell you this if you ask him. Meanwhile, employer provided insurance has roughly the same $800 per employee per month subsidy, usually just a little less as you will find out when you separate from the job and they offer expensive COBRA coverage as an alternative.
Any HR manager (if you can find an honest one) will verify the same. Now think of all the medical resources you have used over your lifetime and consider what YOU could do with a $9,600 annual subsidy in medical savings account, where you could buy the insurance of your choice or just pay $50 per month or so for catastrophic coverage and pay everything else out of the remaining $9,000 in your MSA.
Why wouldn't the government allow that and allow everyone to take control of their own medical coverage for the same money?
The obvious answer, is the need to subsidize illegal aliens, drug addicts and the rest who won't buy insurance and can't or won't pay for anything out of pocket.
My chiropractor told me that the insurance processing and other rigmarole consumed about 3/8th of every dollar he charged, ergo $40 per visit. He was more than happy to put me on a plan where I paid a straight $25 per visit (5/8th) in cash and he didn't have to deal with insurance. I suspect lot of doctors would do something similar if they could.