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

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Fri Nov 4 13:44:21 PST 2005


On 11/4/05, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at dodo.com.au> wrote:
> At 9:43 PM -0800 3/11/05, Gar Lipow wrote:
>
> >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.)
>
>The last bit sounds illigical, if employers can negotiate better rates than
> individual workers, then a Marxist would surely expect any savings to
> be reaped by the employer. (In the sense that the employer would
> otherwise have to pay higher nominal wages to allow employees to buy
> their own health insurance.)

Total wages and benefits are based on bargaining power. If the employers did not provide health insurance they would provide the same money which they buy group insuranc to indivual workers in wages. Workers would then either buy inferior health insurance or buy more expensive health insurance.


>
> > 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.
>
> I can't see how this is logical either. Taxes are of course paid by
> the employing class, either directly or indirectly by having to pay
> higher nominal wages to compensate for higher taxes that workers
> might nominally pay. (So who pays taxes is really a dispute between
> different sections of the employing class, one the working class need
> not takes sides in. So long as someone pays them.)

OK now I see where you got your first point from. You are assuming worker consumption is fixed and can't be cut - that workers in the U.S. have aready been forced to absolute subsidence level. As bad off as they are they have not. Again, workers wages is based on bargaining power - not bare survival needs. Workers have as much as they can extract from employers. If something changes so their wages don't go as far (they have get insurance at individual rather than group rates, their taxes rise) they don't automatically have the bargaining power to force their wages up to match. My third post today -so if it is still not clear maybe someone else can explain it to you.
>
> > That is most currently insured USAians would be
> >better off under a regressively financed single payer plan than under
> >the current system. True?
>
> In the sense that health care and related services would be more
> equitably distributed and more conveniently accessed. But in the
> sense that health care is a socially necessary part of the cost of
> living, it is an unavoidable part of the cost of labour so the
> employing class has to pay for it one way or the other. If they want
> to pay the inefficient way, it will obviously cost them more, but the
> inefficiencies will be at the expense of profits on balance.
>
> That, as I understand it, is the marxist position anyhow, which seems
> to make sense.
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

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