Employer provided healthcare bad for competition?

[Benton]

So, I was talking to an employer (small business, maybe 40 total employees) about the healthcare issue. I asked him how bad mandates and the changes had impacted him, and he said the biggest issue had been paperwork and learning about what he had to do more so than the cost. So in the course of the conversation I asked if — since he cited aggravation as more of a problem than cost — he would prefer going to universal healthcare and just taking the same amount he was paying for healthcare and cutting that as a check to the fed.

His answer was, more or less, that his employees were low paid and insurance was the reason most of them were there. If they could get insurance and make more money working somewhere else — maybe even part time at a higher pay rate — that he wouldn't be able to attract employees.

I hadn't really thought about it that way. To me, it would be a positive as maybe some of those workers would go out and work for themselves and generate more competition. But to him, it would be a negative as he didn't want (or couldn't) increase wages to attract employees.