The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that employers cannot hand tax-free contributions to their workers and tell them to purchase health insurance, The New York Times reported.
Employers who try dumping employees into the healthcare exchanges to avoid having to pay for their coverage are now on notice that the practice is prohibited. Employers who circumvent the law are subject to a $100-a-day tax penalty, the newspaper said.
How can those mean employers even consider “dumping” people? You see? It shows just how evil business is.
Of course, many of our laws — the “Affordable Health Care Act” most of all — treat employers as parents and employees as children.
According to this law, if you’re an employee of a large company, you are their child. As a parent, this large company is obliged to provide you with health insurance considered suitable to the U.S. government.
It’s not enough for the employer to say, “Well, I’m paying all these taxes for government-mandated health insurance. Since I’ve already paid for those plans anyway, I might as well provide incentives for you to get that insurance, instead of paying your health insurance premiums on top of it.”
This seems perfectly reasonable to a person who considers the relationship between a boss/business owner and an employee a trade. But don’t you see? A mommy/daddy-child relationship is not a trade. It’s an obligation. A child does not ask to be born. For the period of childhood, a parent is legally and morally accountable to do everything possible to raise and provide for that child. This is based on the fact that children and parents are not equals, not even under the law.
But now, particularly with ObamaCare, the law is saying that companies above a certain size are, quite literally, responsible for the health care of their employees.
It’s not enough that these employers pay huge taxes for health programs that the IRS now says they may not “dump” their employee/children into; they have to pay again, by purchasing these one-size-fits-all health insurance policies mandated by the federal government.
If you’re an employee and you’re really stupid and ignorant you’ll think, “Gee, thank goodness the federal government is making my mommy-daddy-employer take care of me.”
Do you think that coerced parenting is in the interest of the adult-child supposed to benefit from it? Anyone who does has no clue about how a business works. The employer-business-mommy-daddy will make up the expenses somewhere else. Maybe even lay people off the jobs for which the benefits are mandated.
Of course, maybe the next step is for the federal government to mandate that employers, at least big companies, may not fire their employees. What’s to stop the federal government from demanding this, since it already demands employers to provide medical care?
If employees are legally their boss’ children, then the government may do whatever it wishes to enforce this obligation.
The Affordable Care Act requires large employers to provide healthcare coverage to their full-time workers. Some companies figured it was less expensive to give each employee money to purchase his own coverage on an exchange rather than providing coverage through group policies.
The ruling comes as a blow to many employers who gave their workers tax-free cash contributions to purchase coverage. You see, the federal government, especially as represented by the “Affordable Care Act,” does not like the idea of employees or average citizens being treated as adults. If you are responsible for putting your money aside for medical care, then this means you’re making your own decisions and using your own judgment about how to manage y0ur medical care. We certainly can’t have that!
If we are all children, then what steps will the federal government next be taking to ensure that we are properly cared for? Mandating employers to take care of employees as if they were dependent children is not part of the U.S. Constitution, not by any stretch. And people who permit this sort of paternalistic injustice to take over our society will not long last as an adult, thriving civilization.
Be sure to “friend” Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Rehoboth Beach DE). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest.