- Banned
- #21
you are MISSING the point toomuchtime! I said there would be NO GVT assistance or involvement in healthcare, and THAT MEANS that your business WOULD NOT be getting the tax write off that they get for paying a portion of your insurance plan...
AND if they did NOT get this tax write off, my BET is that they WOULD NOT cover or pay for your health insurance as they are today.
Soooooo, your employer WOULD NOT have any incentive to pay for the portion he is paying for now and would MORE THAN LIKELY drop this benefit and YOU are ALL on your own....
Repubs SAY they want NO involvement of our gvt with health care...THAT MEANS NO tax deduction for the companies either...
maybe i was not clear enough before, but that is what I meant tmt!
care
I understood what you were saying. If employers stopped paying for any part of health insurance, most consumers would start shopping for the least expensive health insurance they could find, and that would be catastrophic coverage in most cases. As the market for individual health insurance grew, insurers would compete with each other to provide the best inexpensive health insurance they could, so the cost of insurance to the individual would be much less than $12,000. Since choosing catastrophic insurance coverage only means consumers will have to pay out of pocket for routine medical expenses, they will shop around for the least expensive providers they have confidence in, forcing down the cost of health care in general. In this way, choice and competition would be restored to the health insurance market and health insurance costs as well as health care costs in general would be lowered.
Your presumption seems to be that if employers had to pay taxes on their contributions to health insurance plans, they would not only stop making those contributions but they would also refuse to give the contribution to the employee as a pay increase to buy his/her own health insurance. In a normal economy when companies compete for employees, I think this is unlikely. By giving employees an increase in pay commensurate with the contribution to the health plan, they amount would remain tax deductible, the employees would shop for less expensive catastrophic coverage and less expensive providers and end up with more money left over in their pockets.
on your last part tmt-
some employers will give their execs the money they were spending in order to keep a strong management team, IF they are in a competitive field or market area....and not give the money they were spending on their pencil pushers to them in their salary, IF they were a dime a dozen....it all depends on the company itself and the competitiveness of the region and industry they are in...in rural areas where jobs are always hard to come by, insurance for employees would be dropped by employers without the tax deduction....
let's put it this way, there would be a lot less people with insurance coverage, imho.
to keep gvt out altogether though, means even individual plans would not be tax deductible.
I think, that ''all of a sudden'' we have a DROP in the demand for health insurance, making the supply of insurance policies available to be bought rise...the companies have the overhead and staff to handle the policies of a lot more people than they would be getting...they can do 2 things....go on the defense and sell off property that is housing employees that have nothing to do, pink slip those idle employees, plan business down OR they can go on the offense and reduce prices IMMEDIATELY, to be able to sustain a similar customer base to support their overhead and sales plan, and ceo salaries....and FIGURE out a way to tighten their strings some, to pay for the lost markup/or earned profit with the lower retail.
in a pure capitalistic situation, this is suppose to be how it works, at least i thought?
care
But you can't judge this particular subject in a purely capitalistic sense in any case, due to one overriding factor.
Everyone NEEDS healthcare. They can't just "Do without it".
When a parent has a sick child, they are going to get health care, no matter what.
Which means that people aren't going to be forcing the market to lower their prices by canceling their insurance, because they can't.
After all, you said NO government interference, and that would include those emergency room freebies for people without insurance, wouldn't it?
And most markets have very limited choices as far as health insurance goes, stopping price competition dead in it's tracks.