Comments on: Employers And Health Insurance Don’t Need To Mix http://www.healthinsurancecolorado.net/blog1/2008/05/30/employers-and-health-insurance-dont-need-to-mix/ Research and discussion of the Colorado health insurance industry and the healthcare crisis in America. Sat, 20 Mar 2010 19:26:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 By: Brian T. Schwartz http://www.healthinsurancecolorado.net/blog1/2008/05/30/employers-and-health-insurance-dont-need-to-mix/comment-page-1/#comment-10565 Brian T. Schwartz Fri, 30 May 2008 14:26:20 +0000 http://www.healthinsurancecolorado.net/blog1/?p=404#comment-10565 Employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) is a creature of a tax policy that punished people for buying insurance through other means. This is unfair and unjust. It might be good for some people, but we consumers, employers, and insurance companies should be free to figure that out themselves, without government tax policy pushing us in one direction or another. My suspicion is that unions benefit from this policy, so Democrats won't consider changing the tax code. Worse yet, ESI must shield insurance companies from competition. How hard to they need to please an individual customer if they know he (she) must change jobs to buy insurance from a competitor? Aside from removing the tax exemption for ESI, one method is "large HSAS": allowing anyone to open up a Health Savings Account, and allowing us to buy insurance with deposits into it. I mention it in my comments on McCain's plan <a href="http://www.patientpowernow.org/2008/04/30/mccain-denver-health-insurance/" rel="nofollow">here</a>. Michael Cannon of Cato discusses it <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0505-23.pdf" rel="nofollow">here</a>. Employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) is a creature of a tax policy that punished people for buying insurance through other means. This is unfair and unjust. It might be good for some people, but we consumers, employers, and insurance companies should be free to figure that out themselves, without government tax policy pushing us in one direction or another.

My suspicion is that unions benefit from this policy, so Democrats won’t consider changing the tax code.

Worse yet, ESI must shield insurance companies from competition. How hard to they need to please an individual customer if they know he (she) must change jobs to buy insurance from a competitor?

Aside from removing the tax exemption for ESI, one method is “large HSAS”: allowing anyone to open up a Health Savings Account, and allowing us to buy insurance with deposits into it. I mention it in my comments on McCain’s plan here. Michael Cannon of Cato discusses it here.

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