Oh, yes you do pay for health insurance.  The benefits you get with your job are part of your income.

Lets say you make $100,000 a year and recieve $30,000 in benefits.  In reality you make $130,000.  That $30,000 goes into your healthcare, and the amount your company pays for healthcare is dependent on how much health insurance costs.

You believe in the free market, dont you?  Well, the free market decides how much you should make.  In the above example the value of your employment is $130,000, with $100,000 in money and $30,000 in benefits.  If your company dropped benefits and only gave money to its employees, then the free market would put the value of your paycheck at $130,000.

Again, you are only arguing for how you should pay for other people's healthcare.

From what i read, this is a very mild solution. Make the insurance mandatory (which isn't unprecedented. Our cars are required to be insured, but we ourselves are not?), then provide a government-funded health insurance plan, but in a way that fosters competition with the big health-care companies, and then extend Medicaid to more of those people who don't qualify for medicaid currently, but couldn't afford it if they were made to get it), and then require all businesses except small businesses to provide it.

Nothing too invasive, but also nothing too helpful, but its a start.

Yes and no. I am paid at the right level for my position. If i worked for a company that didn't pay it, I would still get paid the same.

Now if no one paid health insurance, the scale would be higher.

So Yes and No :)

I am currently in a high demand field (software development). If I interviewed at 10 companies, all of them would pay me about the same, but the benefits would be different.

So yes, it’s part of my compensation, but not something I am trading a salary or. 

Oh, and anyone who pays insurance of any kind, is paying for other people. That’s how insurance works. It’s social by design.

The difference is in most cases it’s an option. If I don’t want car insurance, I don’t have to drive.

In a country like the Netherlands, you can’t tell the government “I don’t want insurance, and I wave my rights to use a hospital if I get sick”.

If that was an option, then I would be all for it, provided all the expense of government run healthcare was collected by the people participating.

They are obviously not paying you the same if they have different benefit packages.  The money for benefit packages doesnt come out of no where, and companies dont pay them for shits and giggles.  Yes, it is something that you are trading a salary for.  When you decided on a job the benefits the company provided should have been included in your personal cost-benefit analysis of which job to choose.

You apparently did this cost-benefit analysis since you previously stated that you made an effort to obtain those benefits from your employer.

Yeah, it is part of your income whether or not you consider it to be.  The reason why employers started offering healthcare in the first place was because of the salary caps imposed during WW2.  This is another reason why it makes no sense that healthcare benefits are tax exempt when at the end of the day they are part of your income. 

And I'm amazed how so many of you know so much about this health plan when Congress hasn't even decided what it is going to be yet.  I guess you guys can travel to the future or something. 

A few problems associated with the US' current implemetation of healthcare ...

Healthcare "Insurance" isn't really insurance at all and is (basically) an open ended pre-paid healthcare plan. In many ways this would be like home insurance paying for people to re-decorate or re-model their house rather than protecting you from risks like fire and theft.

The system discourages the competition that makes other markets so inexpensive and high quality. You rarely choose your healthcare insurance provider (it is typically choosen by your company), you don't choose the coverage you get, you don't choose where you get your treatment, and you don't choose the treatment you get.

If healthcare insurance worked like insurance, these companies offered seperate healthcare benefit plans, your company put money towards buying healthcare services (rather than buying them for you), you made decisions on what healthcare insurance and benefits you wanted (and possibly paid out of pocket if it cost more than your benefit package was worth), and your healthcare paid out a certain value for you to get access to doctors of for treatments you could choose who treated you and what treatment you received (possibly paying more out of pocket if you wanted better treatment), the entire system would become better for (almost) everyone involved.

The funny thing is, why do corporations pay for Health Insurance? The answer: Government.

In certain sectors of industry, government regulated what you could pay someone. That regulation however, did not cover benefits. So, one way a company could entice better employees, was to offer better benefits. This lead to company provided healthcare.

Imagine what the US would be like if health insurance was run like car insurance (or like health insurance was for years before it was paid for by companies).

I completely agree.  The healthcare system does not operate like a free market, and encourages people to make economically unwise decisions.  People's choices are severely limited as well.  Not to mention insurance companies are about as bureaucratic as they come.  They spend a ridiculous amount of money on overhead (even more than many government agencies).  They are essentially a middle man who ends up artificially inflating costs while essentially transferring money from Party A to Party B without ever really contributing anything.

@ Mafoo - Yes, it is completely fair to blame the government for something that happened on a temporary basis over 60 years ago for a modern day phenomenon.  That's completely logical.  Don't blame all the people who beat the anti-government war drum every time the government tried to fix the system from being so backwards. And don't blame the people who manipulate the tax code.

It sounds like you are encouraging the government to take away the tax break on healthcare (i.e. regulate this practice) while just the other day you threw a hissy fit about the government regulating the banking industry.  You really don't come off as credible when you blame the government for every single thing that happens.  You would probably blame the government if one of your pets ran away.