Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal and is the author of the weekly Business World column. He is one of America’s most insightful thinkers and commentators on the political implications of the most pressing business issues of the day. In today’s column ($), Mr. Jenkins examines the relunctance of both political parties and their candidates to address meaningful reform in America’s broken health care finance system. The entire article is a must read, and here a few nuggets:

[P]roductivity miracles don’t descend from heaven but arise when companies choose to invest in new tools to make existing workers more productive rather than hire additional workers. Why? Listen to what business owners say every time somebody puts a notepad in front of their faces: Computers and machine tools don’t create open-ended health-care liabilities. Human workers do.
General Motors, a company that has shrunk by 180,000 employees over ten years, reported last week that its long-term health liabilities now top an incredible $60 billion. GM spends $5 billion annually to treat 1.2 million workers, retirees and their dependents. That amounts to more than $14,000 per current employee, gobbling up what a worker would otherwise take home as cash pay.
. . . Indeed, we’ve pretty much come to the point where we’re trying to do the economically impossible and give a subsidy to everybody. The average family of four now pays about $1,600 a year in taxes to cover the cost of a health-insurance subsidy to itself. No real gain to anybody occurs: We just push checks around to conceal from people the true cost of their health care.
How bad this has become is lost on most Americans. When you add the tax subsidy to Medicare, Medicaid and other federal programs, government now touches 60% of the dollars in heath care. The tax benefit alone comes to $120 billion a year. It’s also grossly regressive: A family earning $100,000 a year gets $2,357 to help pay for medical insurance; a family earning $15,000 gets only $71.
The only reform that stands a chance is one that dismantles the nutty system of tax subsidies that fuels health-care inflation by commanding an unnatural urge to channel every ache, pain and prescription through a third-party payment bureaucracy.