How will we pay for a new health care system? Well, how do we pay for it now?

While we're talking about how we can pay for universal health coverage, let's talk about how we pay for health coverage in the present system.

Currently, we have a bizarre system in which employees pay for their health insurance as part of their total compensation packages. Yes, I know you've been told your employer pays for it. But it's money that would otherwise have gone in your salary. Think of it as a deduction from wages that is taken out before the wages are calculated on your pay stub. It's part of what your labor costs your employer.

You probably have no idea how much that insurance actually costs, either. And it costs a lot, much more than the extra taxes paid by people in countries with government-paid health care.

Employees also rarely have any choice about which insurance companies and products will be offered to them, and they certainly have no choice about which drugs will be on those companies' formularies or which doctors and hospitals will be in their network. They're several steps removed from the people who make the contracts that determine what those hospitals and doctors will be paid for each individual procedure or office visit.

And they accept having people make those important choices without their input because they think they aren't paying for it themselves. The consumer of the services has no choice in the purchase of the services.

And we wonder why market forces aren't controlling these costs?