Employer-Based Health Insurance: "Job Lock" Is Not The Problem, "Insurance Lock" Is

Over at The Incidental Economist, Austin Frakt is publishing an interesting series on “job lock“. This is the idea that, because most of us get our health benefits from our employers, we are “locked” into jobs we don’t like because they offer benefits which we do like (or need).

We get our health benefits from our employer because they are non-taxable. If employees bought health insurance on our own, we would pay premiums with after-tax dollars. Given this government discrimination, the idea of job lock makes sense: If we got our homes from our employers we would surely hesitate to switch jobs, which would result in forced eviction from the current home to a new one.

But "job lock" is not really the problem. Rather, "insurance lock" is.

Read the entire article at The Independent Institute's Beacon blog or John Goodman's Health Policy Blog.