Let's have a little econ 101 quiz.
You work for ABC corporation, it includes health insurance for you and your family. WHO pays for the health insurance?
Who pays? There are a number of alternatives here:
ABC may take the form of the health insurance company and or the health insurance management company. ABC may use ABC assets, customer assets or other third party assets to cover the health care claims. ABC may require a portion of the employee's salary to fund all or a portion of the employee's premium cost. In some cases the employee may accepts the insurance through ABC and in other cases the employee may reject the insurance through ABC.
At any rate, when the rubber hits the road the employee works to receive compensation. Compensation is typically in the form of wages and benefits, but may also be in the form of stock and other assets, or the work may be gratis. When the corporate accountants write a check for your premium it is a check for your labor. You see we work for compensation usually. When someone writes a check in your behalf, they are usually doing so with your permission, with the exception of mandated government deposits. For example, 401k deposits are optional as are health care premium deposits.
Even though the company writes the checks, in a very real sense the employee is the one paying for his health care by providing labor. The check is remittance for work provided as a part of an employment contract. The funding for the check comes from investors, the worker, and customers. Who's paying... you could say the customers are paying. You could say the employee is paying with his labor. You could say the company writes the checks, but sometimes they are just the middle men and managers of the relationship between the work and customer sales. Really it "depends" on the situation and your perspective.
An awful lot of words to say: The EMPLOYEE pays.
Again, I will quote one of the right's beloved handlers; The Heritage Foundation:
A Snare And A Delusion
Employer-based health insurance in this country is the product of wartime economic and tax policy of the 1940s. There is no reason why health reform in the 1990s should be governed by those unique circumstances and outdated tax policies.
Uwe Reinhardt and Alan Krueger tell us that the tax treatment of employment-based health insurance now is sharply regressive. And, Mark Pauly confirms, it contributes to market distortions, high costs, and lack of portability in health insurance. Americans today get tax relief for health insurance on only one condition: that they get it from their employer. This has tied health insurance to the workplace in a way that no other insurance is treated. It means that if we lose or change a job, we lose our health coverage.
Pauly also tells us that employer-based insurance hides the true costs of health care. Thus, there is no normal collision between the forces of supply and demand on even the most basic level.
Most workers do not purchase health insurance; it is purchased by somebody else, usually the company. For most workers, it is a “free good,” an extra, that automatically comes with the job. At least, we live with that comfortable illusion. But, in fact, it is not free at all, and the employer gives us nothing. Because too many people think that the employer’s contribution is the employer’s money and not theirs, the consumer’s perception is distorted (as is the provider’s), and health spending is not subject to market discipline. Likewise, because too many people still do not understand this reality, “hidden taxes” through the employer mandate are politically attractive. Such a mandate thus serves as a psychological snare and an economic delusion.
Karen Davis and Cathy Schoen suggest a payroll tax to finance reform, whereby the employer pays 8 percent and the employee pays 2 percent. If one of our tasks is to make the true costs transparent, this suggestion does not help very much.
In his otherwise enlightening paper, Reinhardt calls attention to the virtues of a “mandated purchase” of health insurance. And he warns that calling an employer’s “mandated purchase” a “tax” comes close to debasing the English language. But, in a similar context, Reinhardt uses the word contribution to describe suspiciously similar functions. Suffice it to say, the campaign for linguistic precision is hardly advanced by using the word contibution to describe the state’s forcible extraction of citizens’ money.
In another context, Reinhardt proposes perhaps the best single reform idea to date. He suggests a simple financial disclosure on the part of the nation’s employers, requiring every employer to put periodically on the pay stub of every worker in America something like the following: “We have paid you X thousand dollars in health benefits. This has reduced your wages by X thousand dollars.” We would add: “Have a nice day!„5
I wish I had a dollar for every time I screwed up. To be honest, my sentence structure was horrible and I was being too subtle / clever when I wrote it. I also enjoyed your rant 
