alt Hacker NewsEmployer provided health care insurance came about during WW2 because Roosevelt froze wages. Companies discovered they could "raise" wages by paying for the insurance themselves.
The practice persisted because employer paid health insurance is tax-deductible, while it isn't if a person pays it out of pocket.
The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.
Replies
Or lower the age for Medicare every year until everyone is covered.
Wouldn’t that leave out the set of people who have no income? For example, long term unemployed, adults switching careers and needing to take a long time off for education, etc? While the solution gets close, I don’t think it’s strictly the same thing. Add on top of that our unnecessarily complicated tax system and this sounds even less equivalent.
I don’t see how this addresses the comment you replied to.
> The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.
Or make employer paid health insurance count as income and therefore not tax-deductible.