I agree with you, but how do you address the counterargument that financing health care requires pooling funds at some level, and a company is a logical place to do that seeing as how they have an interest in having everyone come to work on time?
This has several unintended consequences:
1) People stay in jobs they hate just for the insurance. This harms both the company and the individual.
2) It reduces entrepreneurship. In Canada if I want to start my own company, I don't have to worry about losing health insurance.
3) Children don't work (yet I guess) and old people don't work, so you need other systems to cover them, or just not cover them at all.
Are there any groups that offer health insurance (at a cost) with membership? Ex: IEEE, entrepreneurial groups, etc.
I don't have to pay anything for my health coverage.
And before you say, I do through taxes, my tax rate can be pretty low if I have minimal income, which is often the case when starting a new business.
Now why dental is not part of medical coverage is beyond me, but that's another topic.
Tying health care to employment is a formative cause of wage slavery. It should not stand--and that's before you even get to the economic inefficiency of the health care market itself.
If you had to design a system from scratch now there is no way you would come up with employer based health insurance. It’s a stupid system. Bad for citizens and bad for employers.