Reply #7: Employer-provided medical insurance keeps the peasants scared and tethered to the wheel... [View All]

[warren pease]

Here's an interesting take on the use by corporations of health benefits as a control mechanism to increase employee insecurity and therefore keep them working in the kind of useless, soul-shriveling jobs that, if they lived in a country with a national health care program and other elements of a real social safety net, they'd quit before the sun set on another miserable day of frustration, boredom and hopelessness.

Here's an excerpt from the above-linked article:

THE EFFECTS OF MARKET-DRIVEN CARE

The real effects of market-driven health care on people's lives suggest that the primary corporate motive for imposing this type of health care system is to allow employers to have more control over their labor force.

What are the results of market-driven health care? First, market-driven health care makes people feel insecure about their prospects for receiving health care when they need it. Second, it destroys the trust that patients once had in their doctors by making doctors "gatekeepers'' whose role is often to block access to care. Third, by making health care a commodity to be bought and sold like any other, it expands the growing economic inequality in the United States to include health inequality. Fourth, it pits health professionals against each other in competing physician groups and hospitals. These are four classic methods of social control: make people feel too insecure to challenge those in power, destroy people's trust in one another, make them more unequal, pit them against each other.

Even before the rise of market-driven health care, corporations relied on the insecurity of health care to control workers. For decades, large employers (and some regressive labor unions) have preferred to link health benefits to employment, knowing it gave them more control over their employees. According to a New York Times/CBS poll in 1991, 32 percent of workers did not quit jobs they disliked because they were afraid of losing their health benefits. In June, 1998 General Motors threatened to deny medical benefits to striking workers in Flint, Michigan in order to pressure them back to work. Raytheon actually did cancel health insurance for striking workers in Massachusetts in August 2000, to force them back to work.

Additionally, making health benefits depend on independent agreements between employer and employees in thousands of different companies gives employers the upper hand by preventing employees from acting as a single nation-wide block. This is why American corporations don't want the situation in Europe, where wages and benefits such as health care, vacation, and maternity benefits are negotiated on a country-wide basis between representatives of labor, the government and corporations.

In other words, a scared employee -- thrown to the wolves as an overwhelmed individual rather than as a member of a union or some other organized counter-weight to full corporate totalitarianism -- is the perfect wage/debt slave and will do whatever he/she is told to avoid increasing their already suffocating levels of uncertainty and insecurity.

Just one more way the American dream works to enrich the usual piggies, control the (disappearing) middle class, exploit the working classes and continue to insulate the elites from their richly deserved day of reckoning, going face to face with the people they've screwed to the wall for centuries.


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