Reason Magazine - Why Health Care Isn't Fair: "My family, for example, gets health insurance through my wife's employer, and it costs�...actually, I have no idea what it costs. That's one of the problems Bush wants to address by eliminating the tax code's bias in favor of employer-provided medical coverage, which distorts the insurance market, promotes insecurity, and raises health care costs.
This bias was created more or less by accident. During World War II, businesses competing to attract scarce workers got around wage and price controls by offering health insurance instead of higher pay. In 1943 the Internal Revenue Service decided not to count this increasingly popular fringe benefit as taxable income, a policy codified by Congress in 1954."
