Republican Senator John Sununu said this recently to a group of business leaders:

“I’m not saying it’s not an issue or it’s not important, but proportionally speaking, stop complaining about health care.”

Sununu is wrong. Employers and employees should continue to tell government leaders how big of a problem this is.

Even if you’re lucky enough to have employer-sponsored health care, you are already spending many thousands of dollars per year on health care premiums. Much of this cost is not directly visible the the employee because it is made on their behalf by the employer.

Employers should be required to regularly disclose their per-employee health care costs. Employees should know how much their health insurance costs overall, and how much they would save if there was taxpayer-funded universal health care.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden has introduced a health care plan would go one step further. His bill would require that employers “cash out” their existing employee health plans by terminating coverage and paying the amount saved directly to workers as increased wages. Workers then would be required to buy health insurance from a large pool of private plans. [source]

I don’t know if that’s the best plan or not. I’m inclined to think that we should extend Medicare to cover infants and children, and then slowly expand Medicare over the years to cover more people until we have universal coverage. But something’s gotta give. Across the developed world, it is an established fact that universal single-payer health care is cheaper per-person, and gets better health care results.