Merry Christmas

http://mobile.nytimes.com/art/128439/19

All Big Business wanted this year was to be able to cut off the health care to my grandmother and millions of others like her. Well, yesterday thr EEOC delivered.

The new rule let's employers now give you retirement benefits that expire at 65 if they don't feel like paying for them anymore. Two important things to keep in mind:

1. Everyone seems to forget but retirement benefits are compensation just like a pay check. If a company called you in on payday and said 'by the way, turns out we think we are paying you too much, so this weeks check is only for half what it was supposed to be. Be a team player and don't complain or else we will just shut down and give you nothing' you would probably laugh in your managers face and tell him to go where the sun doesn't shine. For those with total faith in the market, remember that all those people made a ton of economic decisions all based on the assumption that they would get the benefits they were promised. If they don't appear their employer was essentially cheating both them and the market.

It is also important to remember that for five years middle class wages has been stagnant. Couple that with the systematic erosion of benefits and reneging on promises andf it is fair to say the lot of you is getting SCREWED by the fat cats sucking up you annual 3% productivity gain.

2. This is yet another straw to the camel's back that is our public health system. The lynchpin of the EEOC rule is that everyone should get on (and only on) Medicare at 65. Personally I do strongly agree that health insurance should be decoupled from your job on both social justice and economic grounds. Starting the next Microsoft or Boeing is really hard when you have to provide things like this. A family can dip into savings and survive on a dream much better if their sick child can still get her medicine.

But these things are sold as cost cutters in the sense that 'we will kick these people over to the government and then lobby to make sure our taxes don't go up to pay for them' rather than 'if we put everyone into a single basket, cut out aetna's profit margin, and imposed cost saving controls we could insure everyone for less than our current balkanized system'.