From Cafe Hayek: (emphasis mine)
I just received a lovely email from my old friend, Donna Brazile. OK, we’re not old friends. For some reason she has decided to put me on her email list. She writes:
This week, the Senate votes on a GOP amendment that would let your employer decide what health care you can receive. If they morally object to birth control, it’s gone. If some corporation thinks cancer screening is too expensive, forget it.
This amendment is dangerous, and the people pushing it need to lose their jobs.
It is insane that we get our health care from our employers. That happens because we have given a tax advantage to in-kind compensation such as health care. It’s a horrible idea and it leads people to complain about our employers deciding what health care we can receive. Our employers are just a conduit for government mandates, rent-seeking and inefficiency related to health care. What the government has done is tax-advantage health care via employers and then tell them what has to be covered. So the real outrage is that because of this, the government mandates the mix of my compensation package, biasing it toward a luxury health-care package that is the result of special interest clamoring.
Donna Brazile “made her bones” nationally by running Mike Dukakis‘s Presidential campaign back in 1988 – and lost 40 – 10 (State wise). I guess she fails to “remember” that health insurance coverage by employers arose because the Federal Government slapped wage and price controls onto the American economy. So, not being able to offer higher wages because of Federal fiat (er, government distorting the marketplace AGAIN), this was one way for employers to keep and attract good workers. Make no mistake – people WILL be losing their jobs. However, it will not be because employers have the Freedom to decide what is best for them, it will be because Progressive politicians like Brazile have decided that the economic costs of piling on “social good healthcare” mandates on employers is irrelevant. Nor would they ever countenance without respect to the cost of such mandates.
But more importantly, her outlook shows the utter lack of faith that employees (and thus the free-from-political-distortion marketplace) can decide, for themselves, “hey, I don’t like what this employer offers – let me go here instead as it is a better fit for me”. But even staying with the employer-mandated system, which is all but Government mandated because of the skewing of the tax system against individuals, is not enough for her.
She’s an Obamacare Girl all the way; letting individuals actually be in control of their own healthcare destiny is anathema to her and others like her. Look at her words – she does not even wish to let companies the freedom to decide what is best for them.
Individuals like you and me? Never happen if Donna Brazile and her fellow Obamanauts have their way…