Some employers would be delighted to see a government run health care system in the US. What could be better than business getting out from under the burden of health care costs? Perhaps the real question is what could be worse?
Well, higher taxes could be worse, higher wages, less control over health care spending could be worse as well. Those companies who naively believe that shifting health care to a government run plan will relieve them of some financial burden, make them more competitive are quite frankly naive. Look at it this way, if the employer who spends say 6% of payroll on health care suddenly finds that expense gone, does it save 6%? I think not. In a union environment the unions would seek some replacement perhaps in wages. Even without a direct payment to workers, most if not all (or more) of that 6% would be replaced by taxes to pay for the expanded coverage. If workers paid most of the tax which is unlikely, they would certainly seek higher wages to offset the additional tax burden. In France for example, nearly 50% of the employee costs for a worker go to government to pay for health care and other social services, in Germany it is 52% and in the US it is currently 30.1%.
Moving to a government run health care system is not a matter of saving money, it is simply a matter of who you pay and how you pay them. But it is also a matter of the worker, the union and the employer losing control over what is spent and what it is spent on. Currently state mandated provisions to health insurance add nearly 25% to the cost of coverage. Imagine that at the federal level.
The question we need to ask and the problem we need to solve is why does an MRI of the back cost $1,100 and why does an initial office visit to a specialist cost $225?
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