Re: [Marxism] Brooks column (Was Wage share...etc.)

["Sayan Bhattacharyya" <ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/9/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I don't have the documentation handy, but it's widely accepted that the
> rising cost of benefits, which are also notionally included in employee
> "income", are no longer being passed on to workers as improvements but are
> being transferred to the health care and insurance industries. In fact,
> soaring benefit costs are now being used by employers in both unionized and
> non-union firms to roll back existing medical and pension plans across all
> industries.

I believe the counter-argument usually made to this charge is that,
while the cost of health care benefits are rising, this is because
medical  treatments are better and more sophisticated now than in the
past -- new and expensive (and more effective) treatments are now
available that were not available before. The employee may, thus,
according to this line of reasoning, choose a lower-cost option (and
accept a lower quality of health-care than the state-of-the-art, which
quality would nonetheless be similar to, or even better than, what
used to be state-of-the-art a decade ago).  I don't know how much
truth there is to this line of reasoning, though, but on the face of
it it seems a reasonable and convincing one.

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