>>It’s not “welfare” for large businesses at all. Giving them an outlet to eliminate a cost that they were never obligated to incur in the first place isn’t a bad thing.
That “employer-paid” healthcare is a part of a worker’s compensation package, just like the cost of vacation and the actual cost of wages. When an employer is deciding how much to pay an employee, they look at the total cost and not just the salary.
So, if a worker makes $30/hr and another $15/hr in benefits, the total cost (and total compensation) is $45/hr. Giving businesses a way to shift $13/hr of that “cost” is another way of saying that they are cutting the compensation by $13/hr. Will they give that $13/hr to the employee to maintain the level of his compensation (since I doubt his work load will be reduced) or pocket it as profits? We all know the answer to that.
This was a brilliant move by the Progressives, knowing that the greed of the corporations will cause millions of loyal Conservatives to have their compensation cut by 20% or more, and then those workers will decide that they have to vote with the Progs so they can get some of that lost compensation back from the government in the form of subsidies.
It will be the destruction of the petit bourgeois (i.e. working middle class) that Marx says must be done to create the proper split between the labor class and the capital class.
As an employer, if I'm paying an employee $30/hour in direct wages and I'm picking up the cost of a medical insurance policy that translates to around $5/hour for him, it's true that I am effectively paying him $35/hour (let's leave aside any other benefits he may be receiving). But that doesn't mean I'm going to go to great lengths to look for opportunities to eliminate that medical plan just to save $5/hour in costs. Think of it this way:
1. If I'm looking to save $5/hour in labor costs with this employee, it might be easier to just reduce the direct salary to $25/hour either by cutting his pay or (more likely) by hiring someone else to do the same job for less money.
2. It costs more than $5/hour to pay for an insurance plan that translates to a $5/hour cost for this employee. There's an administrative side of this that costs money and is increasingly bureaucratic, legalistic and complex. To be frank with you, it is an enormous pain in the @ss. I'm not in the health care business ... I'm in the business of selling Product X or Service Y. And yes, I'd be perfectly fine just paying the employee $35/hour and letting him deal with his insurance needs on his own. Getting involved in health care for my employees isn't much different than negotiating with their landlords or mortgage lenders, or attending parent-teacher conferences for their children. Did I mention that it's an enormous pain in the @ss?