200 Large Companies Can’t Be Wrong. Can They?
They sent a letter to President Obama; (1) commending the effort on health care reform, (2) expressing hope that the effort will focus on cost control and (3) failing to propose any serious ideas of their own on how to control costs.
As pointed our previously, cost control is the excuse for reform, but definitely not its goal. Actual reform will cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years in extra spending (Translate: Under Obama we are going to spend more, not less!). And since Congress can't find a way to raise all that money through taxes, they will naturally turn to….. who? Duh!
As Lenin said (or was it Stalin?), the captilists will sell their enemies the rope they will use at the capitalists’s hanging.
Yes. The capitalists were going to sell the rope. But these capitalists are going to give it away.
I was a little intimidated by the thought of poring over their six-page letter – until I saw that the letter itself runs just one paragraph over one page and almost five pages are signatures from the 200 companies.
See the last paragraph, where they insist that it is both the employers’ preference and responsibility to provide health benefits, rather than freeing employees and their families to acquire their own health benefits.
Where do they get this notion? I suppose that, inside the DC Beltway, it is fitting and proper that corporate interests agree with each other whenever possible. Because the health insurers lobby to preserve the tax-bias favoring employer-based health benefits, it’s easier for other corporations to just agree with them.
However, Cebul and colleagues also make a compelling argument that employer-based health benefits introduce massive friction costs that transfer consumer surplus to insurers (http://www.nber.org/papers/w14455). Very large companies, which self-insure, benefit directly from this transfer.
So, very large companies benefit from the status quo, to the detriment of individuals. No wonder their proposals for health “reform” lack precision.
This is why we need tea parties. The large companies are more than willing to sell us out.