Re: I thought I heard you calling me :)

Supie, you are sadly mistaken. When I was discussing minors I wasn’t referring to worker’s comp., I was speaking about regular health insurance to cover the normal everyday health hazards associated with the job. People with those sorts of jobs don’t just get crushed in cave-ins but they have regular health issues that relate to working in that environment. For instance, long term health effects from breathing the harmful gases that they do…so I was not taking about worker’s comp but regular heath insurance.

You said “At your job at IBM, where you're required to wear a suit and tie, should IBM be required to purchase your clothes too? It's a uniform of such! You have to get to work..should they pay for your car? Can you not see the slippery slope you've created? Can you IMAGINE the costs of goods and services if every company had to start purchasing everyone's insurances?????”

Again, your slippery slope argument doesn’t hold up. Slippery slope arguments in general are very poor because they are used against every possible change in society and are only based on irrational fear of what will come. In order for a slippery slope argument to have any weight you would have to show that these other possibilities are likely to happen, not just possible. Slippery slope arguments often, as in this case, have to completely ignore the way in which society works and ignore history that shows these types of arguments to be false. For example, when radio was first invented and they began to broadcast football games, many owners of football teams were angry that it would lead people down a slippery slope where since they could hear these games on the radio they wouldn’t come to games anymore but as is almost always the case with fear driven slippery slope arguments this didn’t happen. In fact football attendance grew by leaps and bounds once people heard it on the radio.

There have been employers who have supplied their employees with health insurance for quite some time and no one has attempted to extend the benefits beyond health insurance. This shows how irrational this sort of argument is and that is not backed up by any evidence of any likelihood that any further steps will be taken. If someone argued that giving Bush greater powers during war would lead us down a slippery slope toward more and more loss of freedoms and that if we allow this then they will take that as well, you would be the first person to say that it is nonsense and reject it as no plausible. Your argument is exactly the same and is not backed by any indication at all, of anyone trying to extend the law to require businesses to pay for clothes, car, etc. As I said, slippery slope arguments hold no water if you can’t point to any indication of anyone attempting to take the next step down the slope. Also there is a huge difference between health and luxuries, health is a right of all people but no one is entitled to nice suits or a car.


I personally don’t think that having companies pay for heath insurance is the best idea but since there is no national health care offered (as in Canada) there really isn’t a better way to do it at the moment.