The bolded is kind of what I was getting at. One of the negatives of our system is that healthcare is tied to labor and it's something I thought we wanted to rectify. Are there any other payment proposals or just a payroll tax?
The payroll tax is more politically acceptable in the short term, i'd argue. The employer tax is paid by your employer, even though that de facto eats away at your salary because a higher tax means lower salary because the employer doesn't want to pay more overall.
*However*, since the employer also pays the lion's share of the health benefits, a single-payer system funded mostly by payroll tax and partially by a negligible tax hike could be engineered to be a net zero for median earners.
Let's take an average-ish earner of $36000, or $3000/mo (for easy math). 15% payroll tax, or $450, and a $750/mo employer share insurance premium, with a $60/mo employee premium share (2% of income). Overall that means your employer pays 40% more than what you see on your paycheck. So a payroll tax hike of another 15% would actually save the employer money in this case, and *maybe* pass through to the employee as new income. Meanwhile, a 1% income tax increase at all brackets would, for this earner, be $30/mo back in their pocket, assuming that the premium went away.
You'd make up money on the fact that it would scale at the higher end, so your C-suite executive making $30,000/mo, but whose insurance would still only cost the company $750/mo, now costs the company $9,000/mo in payroll instead of $5,250 for payroll plus insurance, and instead of a $60/month premium the high earner's paying $300/mo in new income taxes, but they can easily afford that, and because the premium goes away it's really only a $240 hit.
A low-wage earner of $24,000 a year would save the company money outright. $1,050/mo on this employee (for 15% payroll tax and $750 monthly premium), and $60/mo out of their take-home pay, suddenly becomes $600/mo in payroll taxes and $20/mo in new income taxes.
Essentially middle America would zero out, poor people would see reduced burdens, rich people would see higher burdens, but only people making above-median pay.
Obviously this is all napkin math, but you could set your payroll tax rate to that sweet spot where an average earner wouldn't notice the difference.