Employer-Provided Healthcare as Social Insurance

Uwe Reinhardt takes on Ron Johnson's op-ed about Obamacare:

Third, the contributions employees make directly toward the premium for health insurance (through explicit deduction from their paychecks), plus their indirect contribution through reductions in take-home pay, are effectively community rated. This means healthier employees are forced to subsidize through their premiums the health care of sicker employees by effectively paying the same premiums.
Consider two workers performing the same work in a company, one healthy and the other chronically sick. They will make the same direct contribution to the identical insurance policy and receive the same take-home pay.
In other words, the idea that raised so many hackles last year — that younger, healthier Americans should, through community-rated health-insurance premiums, subsidize sicker Americans — has long been accepted by the bulk of Americans at their place of work.
In this sense, then, private employment-based group insurance qualifies for the label of “social insurance,” even though it is privately sponsored. It is, of course, not socialized medicine, but neither are the Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare programs, government-sponsored social insurance programs that procure health care from the private sector.

He also discusses the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.  It is very well written, and he takes the time to compliment Ron Johnson.  What bothers me about Mr. Johnson is his attitude that he earned everything he got, and his hostility toward the government which undoubtedly assisted him along the way.