Scipio

Oh, so they're footing the bill so they won't have to pay for it with taxes? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that corporations were in the process of scaling back health benefits. Just look at the union settlement in California. The only people who have solid health care under that system are the old unionized employees. Health care cuts too deeply into the bottom line, and makes domestic companies less competitive.

Second, it's not the corporations that would pay for public health care, it's the citizens.

Note that I'm not advocating any specific scheme of government facilitated health care, just the principle of increasing government involvement, be it through state-run insurance or whatever.

In a sense, it seems like the costs would stay the same, and that the costs would just be moved around. In the end somebody would pay for it. The companies pass the costs along to somebody.

However, that's not quite true. If the government became the provider of the majority of health insurance in the country, it would have the chance to exercise monopsony power over the drug companies and drive down costs. Wal-mart does it all the time, and in a sense it has made large swaths of our economy more effecient. Only in this case, the result will be not only a rearrangement of health care costs, but also a reduction in the aggregate cost of health care. The savings could either be returned to the tax payers, or reinvested in research and development.

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