Let me offer a qualified yes. I worked in the insurance industry for 25 years, and my company has a very comprehensive employee and retiree health insurance program. Raising kids and going through many illnesses and injuries over the years, I’m eternally thankful for the benefits I’ve received over my active and retirement years.
Although I wasn’t an insurance actuary nor other beancounting part of my company, I’m sure that our insurance coverage was calculated by those experts to factor in all the costs of doing business, employee retention and even some altruism. For the past 100 years or so, my company has been making enormous annual profits while covering employees and retirees health insurance. Therefore, that’s why I vote on companies opting to pay for health care insurance as a matter of good business practice.
However, whether they should be required … forced … to pay is another question. As a free enterprise advocate, I don’t think an independent business should be forced to do anything for its employees except to give them safe environments and pay them adequately for their work. As with my experience, if a company decides to pay for health insurance, its decision should be based solely on profit and loss, not some government bureaucracy sticking its nose into its efforts to do business.
If Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton and other government-control advocates manage to bring universal care … socialized medicine … to reality, this entire question will be moot. Then we’ll all be required to pay for health care insurance, whether we need it or not.