American Healthcare = Indentured Servitude for the Middle Class

The notion that we should continue to link healthcare to large companies…is nuts.

Let’s step back and look, as much as possible at job creation over the past 3 decades.  Most of it continues to occur at small companies despite the fact that health care costs have increased disproportionately for small employers over that time-frame:

Prior work from the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation has shown that, since 1980, nearly all
net job creation in the United States has occurred in
firms less than five years old.

But in America…if you have a family…if you want to cover your loved ones at a reasonable cost (nothing’s really reasonable these days, but comparatively speaking).  What is your only choice?  You are expected to suck it up and beg for a job at a big company that has been cutting back employment for 3 decades straight now.  Or more accurately to beg for a job at big companies that have been consistently shipping jobs overseas for 3 decades straight now.  And the insurance industry continues to insist that a system tied to big employers is better…Now why is that???

It angers me…absolutely infuriates me, that statistics comparing actual job creation are almost impossible to come by.   Do a Google on “large employers” “small employers” comparison, or similar.   Almost all links you find are comparisons on health care costs.  No comparisons on who (large vs. small)  is actually creating the jobs over multiple decades, over the very long-haul. Why is this information so difficult to find?  Because Robert Reich is substantially correct.  Corporations in America have taken death-grip stranglehold on Washington politics (and on press spin as well as collegiate research) with another result that any long-term unfavorable comparisons for corporations as a whole are largely avoided at all costs.

And all the while the health insurance industry obstinately insists on propping up its business at large employers:  Profitable and low-risk.

So here is the result:  The most experienced employees, the 40-somethings and 50-somethings, the ones with families sick of working 70 and 80-hour weeks just so they can beg for the chance to work another week and not loose their job to India,  THE EMPLOYEES WITH THE MOST PRACTICAL BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE THAT MIGHT CONTRIBUTE TO CREATIVE NEW COMPANIES AND HENCE TO BURGEONING JOB GROWTH:  These employees are terrified of looking for jobs where jobs are growing.  They are indentured servants to large corporations in America, held hostage by a health-care system that only makes costs reasonable to employees of large employers.  Additionally, because experienced employees tend to seek employment with large employers because of the benefits, large employers enjoy these employees at a comparative discount.  In essence since the health care benefit differential offers larger employers a “free pass” to cherry-pick the talent.  A perpetual, happily silent, convenient pass to rob small companies of smart employees.  That is NOT free market and that is NOT good for the economy under any conditions.  Larger employers should NOT automatically gain access to reduced systemic costs simply because of their size; because then they get access to talent without earning it by creating net new jobs with higher wages.

I am single.  I have two daughters.  My wife died.  She had a preexisting condition.  No one would cover her.  The last three years of her life were a substantially fear-driven ride straight through Hell.   We played by the rules until we finally ran out of Cobra…paying ridiculous costs WHILE UNEMPLOYED.   I will never work for another large company as long as I live.  They are culturally by and large the most disloyal enterprises I have ever contemplated when viewed over the past 30 years.  I am finished begging for a job with fucking big companies just so I can cover my family.  Done.  Any income from this day forward will be at my own companies.  If it puts ME into the grave.  So be it.  I worry for my family…but this system has proven it will not create a stable employment condition for me.  I’ll work for myself.

So when you insist that tax breaks are needed for job creation…I’ll grant the discussion may be worthwhile with regard to small companies; but if you think any large companies will behave substantially differently than they have on the balance since 1980; then you are stupid.  They have displayed the pattern for 30 years.  Tea Partiers: Stop pandering to corporate America.   Stop demanding tax breaks for companies that don’t increase wages OR jobs over the long-haul and stop propping up the health insurance industry by clinging desperately to a band-aided system that is collapsing.  Stop kissing the asses of the likes of the Koch Brothers, Tea Partiers.  Stop kissing big oil’s ass, health insurance’s ass, stop kissing the corporate ass.  Then we can chat together as friends.  But as long as you continue to behave with all the vision of a myopic Pitt-bull who only foams at the mouth over taxes…We have nothing to talk about.

Kill the link between insurance and large companies before that link kills America.  If you start there, other meaningful solutions will follow.  That link is far more insidious and destructive than a federal deficit.  WWII debt was far far higher than today…and the 50’s wound up being one of our most profitable decades ever.  The insurance/corporation link…is progressively eroding America’s capacity to shift talent to where it is needed most.  There is a hard brake, a very hard resistance, on getting smart people to small companies where they belong, creating jobs.  Get a clue, Tea Party.  It’s not about taxes and it’s not about the deficit.  It’s about the link between corporations and Washington and between corporations and insurance.  And you…you just rock right on sniffing Koch butt.  It’s all you can do to focus on one thing.