I reject the idea health insurance is something that should be inherently provided by employers. I'm not asked to provide car insurance, fire insurance, flood insurance, life insurance or earthquake insurance for my employees, so I don't think I should be buying them health insurance. Doing so introduces a huge distortion into the market that only makes things worse.
Well the problem here is that this is something businesses started doing on their own some time ago. Instead of paying employees more money they went with other forms of benefits such as health insurance, stock options, etc. So as this became a more popular practice with employers, and as health care costs have skyrocketed through the years, buying insurance on ones own, without benefiting through group rates which can be obtained by employers, has become more and more difficult to accomplish. So the issue now has to be getting Americans coverage in whatever way possible, and right now our current system relies on employer provided insurance. It isn't like Obama just decided on his own one day that it would be great if businesses paid for everyone's insurance. They've been doing this for quite some time now.
I returned from Brazil in 2008 and I looked into health insurance for my family of four. It would have cost me something like $15,000 a year, and that's not including co-pays and deductibles. Most people simply cannot afford that, and will instead just take their chances that they wont get sick. When they do, the government usually ends up paying for it anyway.
Also, the huge difference between getting insurance through an employer and buying it on your own, is that you don't have to worry about getting dropped due to preexisting conditions when your employer gets it in a group package. So getting it through employers is the cheapest way to get it for everyone. When you buy insurance on your own, they can drop you at any time for just about any reason they want. Two years ago, despite raking in billions in profits, AETNA just decided that it would drop 650,000 of their sickest customers for no reason other than they wanted to make more profits.
And what happens to all those premiums these people paid into for all those years? Do they get any of it back? Of course not. AETNA just pockets it all as profit and tells the sick people to go “F” themselves. That's your precious free market system at work. The only thing preventing these kinds of injustices, is government intervention in the form of regulation, which is precisely what Obamacare addresses when it prevents insurance companies from dropping people due to preexisting conditions. No wonder insurance companies hate it so much!
When I was on my mission I passed out due to a heat stroke, in Spain. The MP overreacted and sent me back stateside so I saw a cardiologist in California. He was recommended by the old couple working at the mission office. I later found out this guy had several malpractice suits against him. This doctor told me I needed a pacemaker implanted in me, which I thought was just absurd. I got a second and third opinion and they thought the guy was nuts for suggesting that. Anyway, to make a long story short, this has been on my medical record and has been haunting me ever since. It was used as a convenient excuse to jack up my insurance premiums a couple years ago, even though I have been healthy as can be expected since my mission. The system sucks, period. It needs to be completely overhauled.
We need a single payer system that is more cost efficient and fair. This would boost business revenues substantially, right? I mean as much as they wail and moan about how much it costs them for providing health insurance, if we had a single payer, tax funded system, then that would lift a HUGE burden off their shoulders. What's more, the savings from those benefits would more than likely translate to increased incomes for employees.