6 ms·

So it is the employer who has to pay for it, not other citizens.

• jjav 3d ago
  Who pays is not that simple. The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee. So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer. So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates. But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company. So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer. So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.