In NZ, private health insurance is not so expensive and therefore not employer-subsidised, normally.

"Cause and effect" on this is not as obvious as it might appear.

In the U.S., the cost of health insurance for the self-employed individual only recently became fully deductible on taxes.

One wonders how things would be if this had been so for many years. I don't take this deduction myself, since I'm currently covered by my wife's insurance through her job (employer provided, but still costs us a lot each month off her paycheck). There were a few years when I had to buy insurance on the open market though, where this would have come in damn handy.

The idea that health insurance should be an employment perk arose during WWII when the inevitable market response to government wage controls was to provide other benefits in lieu of wages. When the government made these benefits tax free, the rest was history.

One also wonders what health insurance would be like today, never mind medical costs, if people had been buying insurance out of their own pockets on the open market for the past sixty years, just like homeowners, car, and all other insurance.