I wish that the Affordable Care Act banned employer-sponsored group policies. The health insurance remains bifurcated between the individual exchanges and people covered under their employer's plan.
That was the goal (if a taxpayer funded healthcare model was not possible), but even just getting rid of employers and dumping everyone on healthcare.gov was not politically possible.
Big and well funded employers love the competitive advantage of having lower per employee administrative costs over smaller employers.
This was sort of fixed at the end of 2016 by allowing all employers to reimburse employees for employee purchased health insurance with pre tax income.
Employers also love obfuscating labor prices so it makes it more difficult for employees to compare wages from employer to employer (although paystubs and box 12 code dd of w-2 does show you the price of the health insurance you are getting, but you usually do not have access to this information when deciding on a job offer).
This always runs into strong resistance by the section of labor force who do get good health insurance coverage by their employers as theyre afraid to lose it.
Which sort of doesn't make sense. The companies that provide insurance would likely continue to provide supplemental policies on top of whatever the government sponsored healthcare would be. The only way that there'd be a difference between companies that provided health insurance vs companies that provide supplemental policies:
- The cost of government provided healthcare does not match dollar for dollar or below private health insurance
- There is no value add from a supplemental policy
Big and well funded employers love the competitive advantage of having lower per employee administrative costs over smaller employers.
This was sort of fixed at the end of 2016 by allowing all employers to reimburse employees for employee purchased health insurance with pre tax income.
Employers also love obfuscating labor prices so it makes it more difficult for employees to compare wages from employer to employer (although paystubs and box 12 code dd of w-2 does show you the price of the health insurance you are getting, but you usually do not have access to this information when deciding on a job offer).