Unless your landlord has about $200K available for a treatment of a serious disease or accident he will not be able to pay and he is not responsible. Having cash to see your dentist or family doctor for an annual checkup or the occasional throat culture is cheap. Everyone should have to pay for these kind of visits, but insurance is for the catastrophic kind of treatments that if we live long enough, everybody will need it.
So what happens if he develops cancer? If a one day stay in the hospital is nearly $10,000 not to mention all other costs surgery, etc... Who pays if he doesn't have the cash? Non-participation will not decrease health-care costs, it drives them up.
Dear visualops,
"My guess is this will have a detrimental effect on business, and employers will think twice about hiring that extra hand."
Perhaps not in that way.
A lot of smaller businesses may be tempted to drop their health insurance plans, pay the $295 per year per employee, and dump the problem on the state, as the state seems to be so explicitly inviting. That could actually cause some employers to hire more folks.
The difference for me would be a 90% reduction in the cost of providing health insurance to my employees. Yippee! I could hire an extra person under those circumstances.
In the overall scheme of things, I suspect that as smaller businesses do this, and the costs to the state start to skyrocket, the state will have to raise taxes somewhere, somehow. Maybe the $295/employee annual tax goes up. Maybe something else has to give.
But then the cost of health care will likely be socialized across the broader tax-base, rather than being borne principally, and directly by business.
I don't think folks will like the eventual outcome, but I'm not sure that it will especially depress hiring by employers.
sitetest
On the other hand, people who now use public health facilities and don't pay anything will be forced to pay for insurance, a partial re-imbursement for their health care expenses.
Would you rather he paid nothing, like today?
No, he probably saves a lot in the short run, so long as he's healthy. But if he contracts cancer or falls off a ladder, he's really screwed. Insurance is a waste of money if you're always healthy, unfortunately that's not something we can count on.
Making employment expensive is what's blowing up the French state right now. Let's take everything that's not working in Europe and try it on the east and west coasts. Brilliant!
Yeah, and why require auto insurance either.
Astute observation, doing business here in the "commonwealth" is difficult enough what with all the rules, regulations and day to day BS including taxes, etc., now throw this idiotic measure in and there's no room for business growth, lawmakers in MA are trying to kill the economy in this State and much to my horror, they are succeeding.