Republicans want to go back to high health care premiums, and lower wages.

Ezra Klein posted this interesting research on the impact of health care premiums on wages. It's a big deal;

I can't wholeheartedly recommend Pew's tax expenditure database as, at this point, it's missing such tax expenditures as the exclusion for employer-sponsored health-care insurance, and that's a bit like having the World Cup without inviting Brazil. What's interesting about tax expenditures, I think, is that they're basically the welfare state for the middle class, cleverly arranged such that they don't look like the welfare state for the middle class.

And because we hide it in the tax code, the people who're benefiting don't really know they're benefiting. They think the poor are getting all this help and they're paying for it. In reality, the lost revenue from the tax exclusion for employer-based health care is significantly larger than the entire cost of the health-care reform bill. And it messes up the system in countless other ways.

And don't even get me started on the mortgage-interest deduction.   

In 2009, the average employer-sponsored health-care plan cost a bit less than $13,500. But virtually no one cut a check for $13,500. Employers generally pay more than 70 percent of their employees' health-care costs. To employees, that seems like a good deal, particularly given how fast costs are growing. A "benefit," as it's called.

But health-care coverage is not a benefit. It's a wage deduction. When premium costs go up, wages go down. When premium costs go down, wages go up. Yet workers don't know that. In fact, the information is hidden from them. That means that cost control seems like all pain and no gain, which makes it virtually impossible for Congress to pass.

A 2006 study, for instance, by Harvard's Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra used malpractice payments to estimate the effect of premium increases on wages. They found that a 10 percent increase in health-care premiums "results in an offsetting decrease in wages of 2.3 percent" and an increase in unemployment of 1.2 percentage points. Compensation is basically a set sum for employers, and they don't seem to care much whether it goes into wages or into health-care costs.

Perhaps the easiest way to dramatize the issue for workers would be to attach health-care costs to each paycheck. If employers listed the cost of health care alongside the bite taken by payroll taxes, it would be much clearer to workers that health-care coverage was coming out of their wages, not out of their employer's largess. That, at least, could help them see the costs of the system more clearly, which is, unfortunately, something that all the congressional debate isn't helping anyone do.