The only way to sensibly, logically and fairly provide health care insurance is for the individual to take responsibility for their own health, and pay for their own health care. Business may elect to offer insurance as a part of a benefits package, but just as wages shouldn’t be established by law, neither should health care.
It’s primarily an issue of responsibility.
When you give someone something for free, they tend to take it for granted – as most Americans take the right to vote or personal freedoms for granted. We know there are pills and procedures to cure every ailment without any effort on our part, so our diets are poor to deplorable, we don’t exercise, we drink and smoke without regards to the consequences and take foolish risks with our personal safety.
We know someone else will take care of us if we don’t take care of ourselves. And the medical profession loves us for it, inventing new diseases to go with the new drugs, procedures and treatments they invent, when they aren’t pushing for more ‘free’ health care insurance.
When health care is ‘free’ people forget to show up for appointments, insist on being treated for things that could be dealt with at home or with over the counter medicines and insist on procedures that are unnecessary or non-essential. The result is that people who really need treatment suffer – “you have six months to live unless you have this surgery, but we don’t have a doctor available for nine months”.
And if health care is available to all, at least to everyone with a job, who is to say what is ‘necessary’ or ‘essential’? Who will control your health care choices? And who pays the cost for people who can’t, don’t or won’t work, due to disability, illegal alien status or just plain laziness?
The other reason business shouldn’t be required to pay for health insurance is that the lack of generally available care is only indirectly their fault. The real issue is the cost of health care, which has increased exponentially since companies started providing health insurance as a benefit. In mid-Michigan, when the unions forced the auto companies to provide health insurance, health care doubled and tippled, as what was covered was expanded in the contracts, leaving those without union jobs, without insurance, to suffer.
And no, the ‘government’ shouldn’t be responsible for health care either, for many of the same reasons. However, the biggest reason the government shouldn’t provide basic health care for all, is because they would be spending OUR money – taxes come out of our pockets! The money to pay for every Tom, Dick and Harriette to have health care would have to come from tax money, and that amounts to redistribution of wealth. If the government provides health care without addressing WHY people can’t afford their own medical care, our money will be redistributed to the hands of already wealthy drug companies, and the indifferent doctors and hospitals.
So no, businesses should not be required to pay for health care insurance, they should offer it as a “perk”, where and when they see fit. Individuals should start taking responsibility for their own health and pay for their own health care. What needs to be changed is the system under which health care is provided – we need more emphasis on prevention, more emphasis on personal responsibility and less emphasis on miracle drugs and procedures.