Boss and Workplace Issues

For years, you’ve held employees hostage with medical benefits that were intended to attract employees in the post-industrial era. You were able to offer medical benefits thanks to the low-cost group-plans you could qualify for, or the self-funded plans into which you could fold profits, thereby reducing your total tax bill. But in a global market, competing with international businesses that are not burdened with healthcare expenses, you find it difficult to compete and continue to offer medical benefits to your employees--without whom you would earn nothing. And your executives are not willing to reduce their exponentially-high salaries to enable the provision of medical benefits for the employees who do the work that earns such hight executive income. But you act as though you think it’s okay for employees, whom you pay up to 400% LESS than your executives, to now pay for their own medical benefits, yet continue to earn your profits. You have a dilemma.

But you are working against yourselves by fighting against national health care. You could have the best of both worlds: a capitalistic economy supplemented by socialistic-like government health care plans that keep your profit makers (employees) healthy and well. So here’s a way out of your dilemma, but you look like you’re working against yourselves: You don’t want to provide medical benefits and you don’t want the government to provide medical benefits. What’s with that? Is the health-care industry threatening you?

And health-care industry: Why do you quaver at the thought of governmental competition? If you were doing your best at providing affordable insurance, our nation wouldn’t be in this dilemma, and government medical plans would be a non-issue for you. Instead, you come across as guilty of gouging--your resistance is tantamount to an admission of mismanagement and manipulation. Thinking-people are not buying into your “threat to capitalism” argument--that’s a cloak. Clean up your act and get creative, or step aside.

Capitalism has it’s benefits, but in a global economy in which business-operating costs are funded differently, perhaps a blended society is worth considering: part capitalism; part socialism.

You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything.

Labels: capitalism and socialism, employee medical benefits, health care costs, health care industry, health care reform