by Nouri Arif

Created on: June 20, 2007

The high cost of doing business includes providing your workforce with the opportunity to stay healthy. This is an aspect of doing business in a land that provides no universal health care system. The United States government sees no point or value in making health care accessible to every person in this country. As that is the case only those that have access to affordable health insurance rates through an employer that can purchase the coverage at group rates can keep themselves and their families healthy without going bankrupt. Therefore, the answer is yes, businesses should, at the very least, make health insurance available to it's employees even if a charge for the coverage comes from their employees wages.

If businesses are not made to make such coverage available and affordable, it is left to individuals to purchase insurance at single family or single adult rates which would make most of the working class in this country the working class poor. Insurance would become the only thing that wages could be used to buy. If that were the case then other businesses would, in a trickle down effect, find themselves doing less business and firing more employees. Those employees would still need to see doctors and wouldn't have either insurance or a means to pay for health services out of pocket. At that point, insurance rates for those that were still employed and buying coverage would sky rocket as no one could pay hospital bills and even more businesses would find themselves in a position to either fire more employees or close their doors. And the sick cycle would continue ad nauseum.

One should also be forced to ask whether it is correct or fair that an entrepreneur, regardless of his or her hard work, should have the right to profit from the labor of their work force and if that work force falls ill to simply throw the employees on the rubbish heap and hire more? It seems that the lessons of Marx and Engels are lost on most as they have been tainted by the label of communism. The workers do, whether anyone likes or not, control the means of production. Any labor strike in history will prove out that point of view. Workers are not second class citizens because they do not own a business of their own. They are human and are as deserving of an avenue to affordable health care as any rich or well to do person. If, by the way, everyone owned their own business there would be no work force to produce anything in quantities enough to make doing business worth while.

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