The same question occurred to me. How did we get into the current situation where it's customary for employers to offer health insurance? Wasn't there some Federal mandate for employers of a certain workforce size either to offer it or pay a tax? This isn't quite the same because the commerce clause can be used here to involve the employers because their businesses are "deemed" to touch interstate commerce. Also the employee can choose to skip the insurance without any penalty.
Health insurance used to be bait offered to good employees to either hire on with a particular company or to stay with their company. It was a recruiting and retention tool.
If you think about it, there’s absolutely no more logical reason why an employer should have to pay for healthcare for an employee any more than an employer would have to buy an employee a company car.
It became a common “benefit”, and somehow over time people began to think that employers were obligated to provide a health plan.
The truth is that employers always should have been finding ways to financially reward employees rather than offering benefit packages. With that higher salary, they would have then had the option to buy their own health insurance or whatever they felt was more important to them.
I’ve no doubt that huge pools of health insurance money resulted in a cycle of health cost increases. Providers saw the huge pile of money and began raising rates to make sure it all got spent since it was there anyway. That made insurance companies raise their rates that made providers raise their rates that made insurance..... vicious cycle.