This, by Hacker, through Krugman, and behind Times Select, is a great point:
We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book "The Divided Welfare State," if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that's about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.
The resulting system is imperfect: those who don't work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens.
What we have isn't a small welfare state, it's an inefficient, fragmented one. And thanks to the holes in our patchwork, we end up paying more for less, overspending on the unnecessary, and creating all manner of bizarro-world economic incentives. No corporation would ever run like this, Wal-Mart's great advance has been the coherency and integration of its operations. Nevertheless, we're continually taught that this inefficient atrocity has been blessed by the free market's kiss, and is therefore untouchable. Lady Competition has decreed that a series of World War II-era tax quirks would incentivize employer-based health care and the vagaries of the business cycle would decide who received benefits.
It's bullshit. And it should be labeled as such.
Update: Brad has more, including the numbers.
