The legal offshoring and non-armslegnth outsourcing of payrolls, simply to avoid providing benefits ought to be clue enough that the time is ripe for an end to the Nanny Corporation.
Companies should focus on business, and not "taking care" of their employees, if only because they do so miserably at it. They've dumped their defined benefit plans, mostly. The defined contribution plans, some of them, look like a really bad case of 'underinsurance', given vesting and other trim-the-sails provisions.
Here is one short-hand effort.
- 1. Companies should be pushed into providing preventive health benefits, for which they might continue to get favorable tax treatment, which would end for other types of care.
- 2. One collective risk pool for everyone, with many providers, should pick up basic care and major medical, cutting out overhead and financing costs and, hopefully, setting the stage for many years of health price-deflation in America
- 3. The insurance companies should get pushed into catastrophic health insurance/re-insurance, and the government should help them transition (perhaps by setting up an auction system for residual risks and accounts for people to buy as much catastrophic health coverage as they can).
- 4. A Canadian-style Drug Prices Commission should be the first step, legislatively, to trying to contain drug costs coupled with a look at how to more effectively use patent law protections. (For now, I don't have a solution to trim the waste involved in marketing drugs, but having the government pick winners or get involved in pricing decisions directly should be anathema to everyone).
