[lbo-talk] re: a Delphi worker on Delphi

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Thu Nov 3 21:43:01 PST 2005


On 11/3/05, JBrown72073 at cs.com <JBrown72073 at cs.com> wrote:
>
> What I have heard from some union officials who don't support detaching
> health insurance from employment is that they're afraid that if there is no demand
> for employers to pay, the burden will fall more heavily on workers (for
> example, through regressive taxes). Still, a tax-funded system would cost about
> two-thirds what we're paying now, in aggregate, unless it's administered by
> Halliburton.
>

I understand this is what you heard, not the position you hold. But I thought there was consensus among economists both left and right (including Marxist) that employer paid health insurance is simply another form of wage. (Workers are better off with it than individual insurance, because employers can negotiate group rates, and additionally insurers are subject to some regulations in employer paid plans that individual plans are not subject to.) So single payer health would be better for workers even if financed 100% via regressive taxes , not only collectively but individually in the majority of cases. That is most currently insured USAians would be better off under a regressively financed single payer plan than under the current system. True?



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