I don’t understand why the article uses labor turnover or health plan churn. Why would that be relevant to the original bolded premise that people like their better coverage sponsored by employers?
If I leave a job or get laid off, usually I’ll get a similar job that has similar insurance. Now maybe you could argue that there’s a big risk of an insurance gap or that something like COBRA is unfairly priced, etc., but that would have more to do with unemployment insurance and virtually nothing to do with the basic structure of health insurance.
When I “churn” in the insurance market, it is almost always going to be a super short-term switch from Insurance A to Insurance B (both via employers) where A and B are incredibly similar.
That seems perfectly consistent with saying that people love employer-provided insurance quality. The employers have to offer the same high quality insurance everywhere, or else people won’t switch. As a result, they do provide the same high quality insurance everywhere, to ensure insurance is not a sticking point that creates job movement friction.
Of course there are outliers offering bad insurance and classes of labor like Wal-Mart retail staff that get screwed by deliberately bad corporate actors, and I’m sure anybody reading this with a personalized anecdote will angrily try to refute me.
But in the aggregate, these are exceptions, and most people like their insurance for the most part and find that almost all possible employers (for them) offer such a nearly fungible set of insurance plans that they can churn jobs without significantly worrying that the insurance they like will be very different at company A vs company B.
There could be many arguments for nationalized healthcare, but this article seems pretty much wrong from its main thesis. People “keep” the private insurance they like all the time, because “churning” the coverage is not at all similar to giving up the coverage or making concessions or compromises for the next plan of insurance you accept from an employer.