Everyone should just be treated as a freelancer. Id rather pay for my own health care thank you very much.
There’s practically no advantage to having health care, retirement, etc dictated by your employer and plenty of downsides.
Only if you're young and healthy and have no pre-existing conditions. Otherwise, enjoy the fun of paying massive premiums for shitty care because you no longer have the group rate from your employer.
Group rates are a hack if anything and insurance companies have no incentive to make less money by having their own version of it.
edit: To explain further. Let's say insurance company A has a group plan and B insures people individually. A is then forced to charge half their clients more than B as the average rate is identical. Thus it's in those people's interests to move to company B and pay less. Now those left on A's plan have even more average risk (as all the low risk people have gone to B) and the rate needs to go up. Rinse and repeat until A has no clients or is bankrupt.
I'm fine with welfare, but keep it out of insurnace. Let insurace be for insurance (i.e. known but unpredictable risks), and welfare be for welfare.
The problem is the same thing happens with employers. Employer A provides high quality health insurance, so everyone with a preexisting condition takes a job at employer A while employer B out-competes them by providing less/no insurance and picking up all the healthy employees who choose them because they can pay better wages. Then it's employer A rather than insurance company A that goes out of business and the remaining employers are the ones that don't provide health insurance.
You can try to get out of that by requiring all employers to provide health insurance, but it really has nothing to do with the employers. It would be superior to require all individuals to buy health insurance instead, but people seem to hate that.
The other option is to require insurance not to deny coverage or set rates based on the existence of a condition if the individual had insurance coverage at the time when the condition became known. Then as long as you were carrying insurance you're covered, which most people will then want to do for exactly that reason, which would thereby prevent the death spiral. But if you don't want to buy insurance, well, then you don't have insurance. See what happens if you wait to buy fire insurance until after your house is already on fire.
Say you're "freelancing" and doing well enough that you can afford to pay not only the extra self-employment tax, but also to pay full market rate out of pocket for every single benefit that a stable employer would provide.
How many clients would you need to make that happen? In my experience, the most successful high-end freelancers - and your comment implies to me, at least, freelancing at a skilled professional level - have a small rotation, or maybe only even one, major repeat client(s).
The dynamic very quickly shifts to one of where the freelancer might as well, for all practical purposes, be an employee of those clients or that one major client, right? Except paying more for everything an employer otherwise would pay for.
There’s a reason that medical bills are the #1 cause of bankruptcies in the US.