This might have been true before the internet, but it’s completely unnecessary now that it is trivial to shop and compare prices for insurance and investment funds.

There’s tons of near zero cost investment options from Vanguard/Schwab/Fidelity, you can go to healthcare.gov for health insurance, and you can go to term4sale for life insurance, etc, etc.

The only difference nowadays is that employers large enough to do non discrimination testing and handle the paperwork have an unfair advantage over small business and individuals by being able to compensate people with tax free benefits, whereas small business and individuals can’t.

I work in a healthcare adjacent business and while there is a large amount of information out there and a lot of market participants it isn't nearly enough information to make an informed decision. Whether a drug you currently use will be reimbursed at your local pharmacy and about what your out of pocket cost will be is entirely opaque to the consumer - it's even opaque to drug manufacturers and, in many cases, the precise cost is opaque to insurers until the pharmacy actually states their fill cost to the insurer for reimbursement - and these charges are arbitrary and continuously in flux.

When shopping for individual insurance you're trying to balance a lot of future unknowns - will you puncture your kidney in the next year and need dialysis? How likely is it and how much is 50% POC (Price of Charge) coverage worth to you? Are you going to need an oncological drug due to a sudden cancer diagnosis - those can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a month - I hope you don't accidentally choose an insurance that covers treatment for all variants of cancer except the one you need treated.

The health insurance market is insanely opaque and most employers pick a reasonable plan and, when that plan inevitably refuses to cover a necessary procedure for their employee - they bitch and moan at the company over the phone and leverage their collective bargaining. There are also some really good reasons that the ACA didn't extend the individual market as a replacement for medicare since those insanely expensive and obscure treatments get more likely as you age.

Right now we're sorta surviving on insurance supplemented by go-fund-me and good will but that's a terrible system. Sudden insane health expenses can happen to you - I hope they don't, I wish they didn't happen to anyone - but our current system treats most folks decently well and really screws over a select few, and not due to any particularly stupid decisions on their part in most cases.

Collective bargaining is most useful when the 'little guy' has few options, or the switching costs are very high. Consumers seem to do well when purchasing other types of insurance, and I think they'd do well to get rid of the principal agent problem (if they can keep the tax benefits).

I think the biggest problems with employer-provided benefits come at the 'employment transients' (i.e. the time just after leaving jobs and while getting new ones).

If group pricing were eliminated and levels of coverage standardized for a universal open enrollment period then pricing would be consumer oriented and most would be extremely competitive.

HR people can only get numbers from a small number of insurers after an excessive amount of time and have leverage as weak as someone buying a new car.

Coverage standardization would be an absolute game changer - but at that point that standard of coverage is being dictated by someone - either a cartel of the insurers or the government. It's much more likely to be done by the government but if that's the case then you essentially have medicare for all except you have a bunch of private bureaucrats in the middle draining money out of the system and adding no value.

If the precise definition of the product is dictated by the government then what differentiation are the insurers actually providing that adds value to the equation. Right now insurers actually do do a fair amount of good work trying to assess treatment efficacy and ensure that their customers get the best outcomes within a reasonable budget. If coverage is standardized then they're just acting as a pool of money - cash goes in, it comes out, occasionally one of the pools will go bankrupt and catastrophe will befall a lot of folks - or else the government will step in and save it so... why not just let the government run it?

> why not just let the government run it?

Insurer's roles would be marginalized to competing on doing just enough administration and estimating/negotiating cost/pricing.. They also would still have incentives to cut costs as they get temporary benefits of cost cutting until copied by the other insurers. It's not a lot but it is areas medicare has problems with (and pricing would get harder still without a reference private market) and retaining a private layer is more compatible with the politics of the US even when it is a pure cost.

Insurers have actuaries to make sure they don't go bankrupt. They would be plenty happy to just sit there as middle men skimming off a cut forever. With standardization of care it becomes a lobbing fight as every other player in the industry, plus various groups representing the public, are also working to get that standard to cover everything imaginable. This already happens with state minimum coverage requirements.