The high cost of doing business includes providing your workforce with the opportunity to stay healthy. This is an aspect of doing business in a land that provides no universal health care system. The United States government sees no point or value in making health care accessible to every person in this country. As that is the case only those that have access to affordable health insurance rates through an employer that can purchase the coverage at group rates can keep themselves and their families healthy without going bankrupt. Therefore, the answer is yes, businesses should, at the very least, make health insurance available to it’s employees even if a charge for the coverage comes from their employees wages.
If businesses are not made to make such coverage available and affordable, it is left to individuals to purchase insurance at single family or single adult rates which would make most of the working class in this country the working class poor. Insurance would become the only thing that wages could be used to buy. If that were the case then other businesses would, in a trickle down effect, find themselves doing less business and firing more employees. Those employees would still need to see doctors and wouldn’t have either insurance or a means to pay for health services out of pocket. At that point, insurance rates for those that were still employed and buying coverage would sky rocket as no one could pay hospital bills and even more businesses would find themselves in a position to either fire more employees or close their doors. And the sick cycle would continue ad nauseum.
One should also be forced to ask whether it is correct or fair that an entrepreneur, regardless of his or her hard work, should have the right to profit from the labor of their work force and if that work force falls ill to simply throw the employees on the rubbish heap and hire more? It seems that the lessons of Marx and Engels are lost on most as they have been tainted by the label of communism. The workers do, whether anyone likes or not, control the means of production. Any labor strike in history will prove out that point of view. Workers are not second class citizens because they do not own a business of their own. They are human and are as deserving of an avenue to affordable health care as any rich or well to do person. If, by the way, everyone owned their own business there would be no work force to produce anything in quantities enough to make doing business worth while. Besides if everyone ran their own business, we’d never have time to shop, we’d have to keep our stores open during times that other stores were closed in order to make sales.
The government of these United States allows for tax breaks on a businesses spending. If the business has an over head, to wit; health care for employees, those costs are reducing the tax burden of the company in question. The business, therefore, sees a return, of sorts on the investment. When the owner of the company gets rich from the labors of his or her workforce and the employees get sick and broke for their trouble and unemployed due to their illness, we will have a very frightening group of sick employees to contend with at every level of society. We will also see a very weak and troubled economy looming on the horizon. Just the sort of things that lead to revolution.
If a business is not in favor of having the Unites States government make strides towards a universal health care system, then it must be willing to provide the bare minimums of health care availability to the workers they employee. There must be avenues that any worker, regardless of his or her status or wage, can use to stay healthy enough to participate in the commercial and democratic society that we say we are. Further hardships placed on those that toil for a living while greater rewards are made available to those that grow rich from their labors increase the divide between the classes in this supposedly classless society. A large enough divide makes the house become divided and we all know what that wise man once said about a house that is divided. Don’t we?