Why can't Joe Biden acknowledge tying health insurance to employment is a problem?

An anecdote from his Mother Emanuel speech was telling.

Health care is probably the biggest social policy crisis in the United States — millions of poor Americans are losing Medicaid and tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Meanwhile, those with good employer-sponsored insurance are one job loss away from losing it. President Joe Biden, though, doesn’t seem to understand what must be done to solve this problem.

In the middle of his speech yesterday at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church, Biden shared an anecdote from his childhood about his father losing his health insurance at work. It starts at 37:38:

I remember when I was a kid. We lived in a three-bedroom house with four kids and a — and a grandpop living with us. And my headboard in my room was up against — it was a little split-level home. It was a — we weren’t poor. We were — anyway, we weren’t — we sure weren’t wealth- — wealthy.

And I remember really, one night, hearing my dad was restless, because the headboard was along my headboard, on the other side of the wall. And I asked my mom the next morning, I said, “What’s the matter with Dad?” She said, “Honey, his employer just told him they’re dropping health insurance.”

What that does is deprives a man and a woman of their dignity. How do you look at your child and say, “I can’t cover you. I can’t take care of you.”

With his emotional anecdote, Biden made clear that he gets losing health insurance at work is catastrophic for families. One might assume he therefore supports some kind of health care policy that would eliminate the problem of Americans constantly losing their health insurance when they are fired, laid off, switch jobs, leave the work force to engage in carer responsibilities or whatever. Nope. Biden has promised to veto legislation that would divorce health care from the workplace. And, since taking office, he’s done nothing to move the country way from the precarious employer-sponsored insurance non-system.

You might respond, well, now Joe’s dad — if he can’t afford to shell out for COBRA — could just go to healthcare(dot)gov and find great health insurance. No problem, amirite? Anyone familiar with enrolling in a so-called Obamacare plan knows the entire situation is suboptimal, to say the least. Enrolling in a marketplace plan is insanely bureaucratic and inevitably results in coverage inferior to an employer-sponsored plan. You’ll probably wind up with a huge deductible and narrow network of providers. There may also be a coverage gap of weeks or month(s). After a decade of Obamacare, it’s clear that failing to separate health insurance and work has been the Achilles heal of the policy.

Biden’s rhetoric on health care speaks to a larger problem with his governing philosophy that I’ve discussed before — he doesn’t seem to understand the role of government in helping citizens meet their basic needs outside of the employer-employee relationship. Biden appears unable to conceptualize the role of the welfare state in contemporary society. In his mind, all well-being and welfare challenges can basically be resolved by helping dad find a better job at the factory down the road.