re: Affordable Care Act. HAHAHAHAHA!!!

No, here is what I am telling you. Obamacare isn’t magically covering preexisting conditions or making anything more affordable so it’s a non starter. Giving people the illusion of “affordability” and “covering” preexisting conditions by forcing insurers to absorb the losses by exponentially raising the rates of everyone else and driving out any competition by giving billions to a handful of massive insurance companies like BCBS. Everyone that defends this crap either didn’t have insurance prior to 2008 or gets a subsidy. You don’t destroy the healthcare system to make it almost unaffordable for the average American just to give the illusion covering preexisting conditions. Cancer is a unique scenario which is far different than what is the main flaw in requiring coverage of preexisting conditions like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease which are largely preventable. That is the massive drain on the system

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Capitalism does not work when it comes to car crashes and emergency rooms.

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Capitalism does not work when it comes to car crashes and emergency rooms unless it is truly a capitalist system.

FIFY

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But that's not the original claim on this thread. The original claim is that there is something unique about getting your insurance from your employer that drives prices up, and I don't think there is, and nobody has posted anything yet that has changed my mind on that.

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There's a lot longer answer and it's more complex than I care to write, but when the consumer doesn't actually pay for the product, the price always goes up over time. When a consumer only has to pay a $100 copay they don't care about the overall price. They don't care about services being repeated. They don't care about how necessary those services are. Example: 40 years ago, people used to actually go and get their xrays and take them to a different doc or from the hospital to the doc. Now, more xrays are always done...added cost. Consumer doesn't see the actual bill and doesn't care.

The same thing has happened with universities and student loans.

And who will pay for indigent care?

Us, the rest of us?

How do you not understand that this is what Obamacare does?

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Capitalism does not work when it comes to car crashes and emergency rooms unless it is truly a capitalist system. FIFY

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How will capitalism work when you are in car crash on the highway in South Dakota and the nearest hospital is 50 miles away? And the next one is much further?

Hey genius, Obamacare doesn’t cover anything other than taking the tax dollars of others. That isn’t some great business idea, it’s a bloated government program that is unaffordable. Who do you think pays for indigent care? The same people who have for the last half century except now they also get the awesome benefit of unaffordable insurance premiums on top of paying for indigent care, awesome system!!

Need to get rid of all the illegals and anchor babies.

Then re-evaluate everyone that’s on disability, food stamps, Sec 8, etc.

No one is entitled to a free ride.

The clown show needs to stop.

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Capitalism does not work when it comes to car crashes and emergency rooms.

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Capitalism in the insurance industrial complex, as opposed to bureaucratic corporatocracy, would result in better coverage and more affordable medical care rates and insurance costs.

Pardon me for not trusting a government that lost track of over $100 billion to Ukraine and over $2 trillion handed to Pete Bootyjudge. And that government, people want to establish a cost-effective, non-bloated Healthcare system. The same government that will gladly pay welfare to illegal aliens but will imprison a grandma waving a tiny American flag that dared to follow CHP officers into the Capitol building. The same government that authorized completely illegal raids on Trump properties while ignoring the cocaine habits of the First Son in the White House.

If there was a way to possibly have less than ZERO trust in anything government, I'd be the first in line trailblazing.

Obamacare isn’t Medicaid. It never was a handout created to give poor people health care. I’m self-employed and live a modest lifestyle. Obamacare co-opted my individual insurance plan and forced me to either break the law (and good sense) to go without health insurance, or to accept the snare of government subsidies.

Now there are millions of people like me who were forced onto Obamacare 15 years ago against our will, and we woke up yesterday to a huge increase in premiums.

The Democrats created this disaster, but the GOP will own the fallout of premiums skyrocketing. They are supposedly the party in power, and they have done nothing to avert this disaster.

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Because the market would demand them.

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Nope.

And you still haven't posted any reason why you think it would. You've detailed what you think would happen, but not why. I don't think employees would renegotiate at all. Especially lower level employees.

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The net result would be about the same for the employer, but much better for the employee who could choose to spend the extra money as he pleased rather than being forced to consume health insurance.

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Again, there's nothing preventing people from doing that right now. Why aren't they? They would get a tax write off that they aren't getting right now if they renegotiated for a higher salary and no health insurance and bought their own. So why don't they?

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A current employee, who receives heavily subsidized insurance from his employer, is not likely to go out and buy another policy.

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Right. That's what I said. They can get insurance much cheaper from their employer than they could on their own. You're the one that keeps trying to argue that tax write offs are people's primary motivation. I think for the average person tax write-offs are 4th or 5th on the list of motivations.

People buy things they already want to buy and justify it with it being a tax write off. They aren't a true primary motivator.

And for good reason. If you're in the 32% tax bracket, for example, when you write something off, you only saved 32 cents on the dollar. If you're in a lower bracket, you save even less.

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The reason is because an employee can receive a benefit, albeit an inefficient one, and not pay income taxes on it.

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In addition to directly contradicting yourself above, that's a wonder of circular reasoning. You're literally claiming that people currently don't follow the behavior you say they would if your solution were enacted when they have no idea that your solution exists. They can't be motivated to act the way they do now to avoid taxes on their health insurance that currently don't exist and that they have no idea anyone is proposing.

No, they choose it because it's cheaper. Which both you and I have already posted.

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This was a boon for the company, but we gave no additional salary

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Just like nobody else would.

This conversation is a marvel of self-contradiction.

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And BTW, even with thousands of employees, we had no leverage to negotiate the cost of the plan.

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Then I will stand corrected on that part of my claim. But still. Nobody has posted anything to substantiate the claim that employer sponsored health insurance causes prices to rise specifically because it is provided through the employer.

Which was the original claim. All of this discussion about taxes is nothing but a red herring. I've already showed that the implementation of employer sponsored HI had nothing to to with taxes.