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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (24207)	7/16/2012 7:35:07 PM
From: TimF	3 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Except that the idea that Obamacare helps the employees is debatable to say the least. Creating an incentive for the marginal (near 50 employee) business not to hire or to fire a few people, isn't good for employees. Increasing the cost to cover employees isn't good for employees (who may lose coverage or possibly their jobs). More generally (not just on this law or issue), hurting employers will tend to hurt employees. Even interventions designed directly to shift benefit from the employers to the employees (like minimum wages) harm many employees, by causing them to become ex-employees, or in some cases by causing a reduction in other forms of compensation that they might prefer, or causing their work experience not to be as good as it otherwise would have been, since less money gets spent on their work environment, or by causing employees to be more demanding etc. Its not as if their is some fixed pie, that the government can decide how to redistribute. Deciding to redistribute or to set rules, doesn't just change the one thing you want to change leaving everything else the same; it changes the size and flavor of the pie,. And yes companies have dealt with incremental costs, but that doesn't mean there has been no negatives from that. Increase a companies cost and the company doesn't really pay it, some people do. It might be the employers (in lower compensation, or other changes, or losing their job), it might be the consumers who pay more, or miss out on goods or services that are not available because the extra costs or less flexibility from the rules imposed by business, or it might be the investors or business owners, often its some combination. but some people are going to take a hit. You might be happy to have the investors take a hit, I'm not, not even in direct terms (just considering the impact on them and not the indirect results), assuming you do disagree - Fine lets for the sake of argument, give zero weight to their loss. That still doesn't mean the situation is not problematic. 1 - You can't be sure that the owners or investors will be the ones taking the hit. To the extent they can pass it on to someone else, they have an incentive to do so. and 2 - If they do take the hit, it creates a distinctive for them to create or expand businesses, (which is esp. strong when the expansion will expose the business to a lot more expense), and it can distort and reduce the benefit from the work and investment efforts they do make to create wealth, you get more gaming the system, more attempts at rent seeking, and even without such efforts you move investment from what produces the best real return to what produces the best return under the rules distorting the effort. So you get less and less efficient investment, which reduces the welfare of the worker and the consumer (at least relative to what otherwise would have happened, its often a reduction in the increase of wealth and income and economic welfare rather than an outright reduction).