Until the 2008 financial crisis hit, out-of-pocket medical costs accounted for over half of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. The most common scenario was when the family breadwinner fell seriously ill. Then not only did household medical expenses rise sharply, but household income dropped off by half or even to zero.

When it comes to health care, the middle class is often screwed more than the poorest and the richest of us.

I guess in the very narrowest sense, this statement is true. However, there are many poor and low to mid income Americans who can’t afford insurance and who aren’t poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. And, of course, there are many other Americans who can afford, and do have, insurance, but are still forced into bankruptcy and economic ruin because of the amount of their deductibles and co-pays or because of limits on their policies.

The currently uninsured in America are those who are above the poverty level (i.e., working-class) but who don’t receive health insurance from their employers; the self-employed; those with pre-existing conditions who no insurer will take on.

If we conservatives could start over, we would do away with this link between employment by a large corporation and health insurance. So would you liberals. The difference between us is what we would put in its place. (I opposed the public option because I didn’t want the replacement for corporate serfdom to lead to single-payer, NOT because I thought the current system is all that great.)

But it’s way too late to start over. 70% of Americans get their health insurance as group plans from their employer, tax-free. They’re used to it. And it’s too easy to scare them by proposing to do away with it–better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Nixon found that out the hard way in the 1970s. The Clintons found that out the hard way with HillaryCare in 1993. McCain found that out in 2008.

But if I recall, one of your biggest objections to a public option, particularly a broad public option, was that companies would drop their healthcare (and probably as a result raise wages) because their employees would then go get coverage under the public plan.

So in essence … you support this serfdom?

How’s that working out for them?

Heh.

Effectively, then you had a dual welfare state system: One for well paid and well benefited union workers, and those companies who matched those benefits, and then a weaker one consisting mostly of just welfare, social security and unemployment benefits for the rest of the workforce. Off topic a bit, but, ultimately, this damaged the Democrats with the white, unionized workforce who grew resentful of paying two sets of “taxes”: their ordinary taxes, which they angrily viewed as supporting “deadbeats” (and there was a strong element of racial animus to this), and also paying their union dues to support the excellent wages and benefits they received via their union contracts. In the North, many of these folks became first the angry ex-Democrats who voted for Nixon and Wallace in 1968, and then the famous “Reagan Democrats” of 1980 (the non-union evangelical Christians of the South were a different constituency, of course).

After World War II ended, the IRS tried to relinquish the tax breaks–but they had proved so popular that Congress summarily overruled the IRS. And that was that! From then on, we would have a health care system that bound workers to corporations like serfs.