Tom Price: “what an honor it is to come before my colleagues tonight to talk about some of the most important aspects of all of our…”

“what an honor it is to come before my colleagues tonight to talk about some of the most important aspects of all of our lives, and that is our jobs and our health and how they are tied together. I think it is helpful to begin this by answering the question, how did we get to this point? Why do most Americans receive their health insurance from their employer? Did you ever think about that? Whether it is good or bad. You think about other kinds of insurance. Car insurance does not come from your employer necessarily. Certainly, health insurance does, and that is so incredibly important. Your home insurance does not come from your employer. Why health? Like most things, it has a long and a curious and sometimes a colorful history. By way of introduction, and I will be brief, but I think it is important to review kind of how we got to where we are right now. Actually it begins during World War II when employers were short on employees, and they were attempting to attract employees, and so they offered a health benefit to try to encourage some folks to come and work at their place of business. The government at that time had to decide whether it was going to treat that health benefit as a taxable benefit or whether it was going to be a nontaxable benefit. Were they going to tax the employee for getting that benefit or not? What the government at that time elected to do is to treat it as a nontaxable benefit.…”