Save the Sanctimonious Blather about the Backbone of America

I will be the first to admit that knowing what to do about universal health insurance is not only far above my pay grade, but above my ability to comprehend, similar to my inadequacy in “getting” descriptions of the origins of the universe and the phenomenal popularity of Jon and Kate Plus Eight.

One thing I am certain of, however, is that the arguments one hears in certain media outlets, including Rush, Sean, and Human Events, that mandating employer health insurance coverage somehow infringes on a sacred freedom, are specious. These arguments are remarkably similar to the arguments in the early part of the last century that minimum-wage laws and worker-safety regulations violated the sanctity of contract. The Supreme Court, during the New Deal, happened to notice that the Constitution nowhere recognizes the “freedom of contract,” and state and federal laws and regulations requiring employers to pay at least a set minimum to hourly workers, or to pay overtime to those who work more than a set number of hours per week, were perfectly valid.

So too with Social Security and Medicare payments. For every dollar of wage paid to an employee, approximately 7.6 cents is withheld from the employee. Likewise, the employer must remit 7.6 cents to the federal government for its portion. It isn’t cheap, and both employers and employees look at the burden created and wonder whether they are getting equivalent value for the money paid into the system. Yet society determined, in the 1930s for Social Security, and in the 1960s for Medicare, that basic notions of human dignity required that the elderly be covered by these programs. Medicare, for all its faults, provides first-rate health care to senior citizens, and it is probably fair to say that no political candidate could be elected today who seriously espoused eliminating Medicare.

There is nothing wrong with now mandating that any employer over a certain size who wants to operate a business must either provide insurance or pay into a health care plan for its workers. The “backbone of America” argument that posits that this is a socialistic attack on small business owners would not fly if the topic were Medicare or Social Security. In those cases, the employer who doesn’t pay into those programs isn’t an American hero, he or she is a criminal.

Society would not countenance an employer who whined that the only way he could stay in business would be to pay his employees five dollars an hour instead of the minimum wage. Instead, society – acting through the government – would say, all right, then you cannot remain in business and it’s no big loss. If the business owner were the true entrepreneur and rugged individual the myth says he is, he’d simply pull up his socks, apply American ingenuity to his business, and squeeze some efficiencies out of his business from some source other than the hides of his workers.

We, as a society, have determined that basic human dignity requires a minimum wage. We have determined that basic human dignity requires Social Security and Medicare. Each of those is paid for first by the employer and, in the latter two cases, the employee, but ultimately the costs are passed on to society in the form of higher costs of goods and services.

Frankly, it would level the competitive playing field to require all employers to provide health insurance. We would understand the squeals of indignation from a company paying at least minimum wage and Social Security and Medicare if a competitor were permitted to skip those expenses. Here in the Southwest, that perceived unfairness has led to laws imposing severe sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants. If our representatives in Washington now want to say ALL employers must add health insurance to the list of requirements they must meet in order to operate, then there is nothing wrong with that. So let’s save the sanctimonious blather about the attack on small business. Small business deals with regulation all the time. Let’s show some respect for the low-wage employee whose ability to lead a dignified existence can be destroyed in a flash by a sudden accident or illness. Business – large or small – isn’t the backbone of America; her people are.