Tying your health care and retirement to your job is an obviously stupid system that we never should have built in the first place but the good news is that business and labor should naturally be on the same side of fixing it. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-employ...

The Employer-Based Social Safety Is a Disaster. We Can End It.

Business and labor are on the same side here.

I thought when Obama was President, they understood this. Why hold on to the cost and administration issues when you could have a simpler system funded equably by the whole country?

We?

This piece near the end feels critical and hard to predict. Couldn’t a more empowered workforce compel large employers to fight to retain whatever advantage over small employers they could? And isn’t access to more affordable healthcare via the scale they’re able to leverage one of those advantages?

I'm always surprised corporate America doesn't push universal health care. Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper for them to push this responsibility off on the state?

The whole of the economy would benefit if people were free to leave jobs and start businesses without fear of losing health coverage, but individual businesses would lose the ability to keep some employees if that same fear disappeared. So they selfishly support the current fear-based setup.

Unions don’t want universal health care. They recruit based on providing generous benefits.

Labor/ business are not on the same side.Employers LOVE the current setup. Ties people to their job easier. "If I quit, me/kid/wife will lose medical care. I can't just quit/my job will fire me if I take too much time off". If that was true, employer health care would have been gone in the 1950s