Paying in income-type tax would be much less burdensome to businesses than the current system of yearly negotiations with insurance companies and administering the insurance paperwork for their employees.
And it's not very liberating for the employee, because he can't reduce his costs by living as healthily as he can and opting for cheaper coverage to prevent catastrophic losses, such as a Major Medical plan or a Health Share plan, or no coverage it all. (The latter has heretofore been common for Americans who are in low-risk groups, e.g. young unmarried employed men ages 20 - 30, who choose to take that $nK a year and put it into something they want more, i.e. a business start-up.)(We call this "choice".)
Welcome to the burdens of living in a modern society. We make it mandatory here in Florida to purchase auto insurance to protect people from having to deal with paying for things out of pocket caused by uninsured motorists. Health coverage ought to work the same way, everybody pays in and it is there when you need it.
It also results in a sharp reduction in the number of providers, since doctors will get out of a system which micro-manages their professional and ethical judgments and triples their paperwork. Most potential medical students won't bust their butts to go through all those years of schooling, internship, residency, etc. just to be put in the shackles of a system "with all the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service and all the compassion of the IRS".
We're already undergoing a severe shortage of doctors and it's been happening since before the passage of Obamacare. It's caused by a population increasing faster than the medical schools can push out doctors. Fix the supply of doctors by building more medical colleges and making it so that becoming a doctor doesn't mean taking on crushing levels of student debt.
The same is not true for just existing --- being a legal resident of the United States. Just "being here" creates negligible risk of calamitous damage to other persons and their property.
On physician supply and climate of care: Of course there are many factors which influence the supply of doctors: number of openings available in med school, the burdens of student debt, etc. But a big one is the climate of care. With the disappearance of freestanding doctors' offices, small practices and even small hospitals --- due to much higher overheads, complex record-keeping and omnipresent minute regulation --- the care environment becomes depersonalized, even "industrialized." Couple that with stagnant or dropping levels of compensation, and you see lots of doctors leaving medicine (Link) and patients suffering from big declines in personal care.
Literally hundreds of thousands of examples of this in the U.K.
NHS: shabby, unsustainable, our future.
The larger the cost sharing pool and the more real competition, the better the insurance deals would be. Up til now, we've relied almost entirely on employment for health coverage. That, coupled with a ban on interstate sale of insurance, has led to much smaller cost-sharing pools and very little actual competition, with one insurer often dominating entire regions. Fifty different sets of rules and regulations have historically governed insurance sales across the country, with consumers almost always bound to their employer’s choice for health coverage – and worse, should they lose their job, finding themselves suddenly without any insurance at all.
It's hard to defend such an ad hoc "system" with its innate inefficiencies and skyrocketing costs.
The argument that no modern, industrialized nation should be without universal coverage is persuasive. But other Western nations have found ways to achieve it through far more decentralized means than Canadian-style single payer, or the expensive socialized medicine of the UK. The Dutch --- I've read --- have achieved universal coverage entirely through fierce competition between private insurers, and the Germans use a system of exchanges that allow German workers to move from job to job without losing insurance. The Swiss, who have made an art of subsidiarity, have achieved universal coverage through competing non-profit insurance plans.
I myself would like to see a competitive system with the following features: