Why Your Health Insurance Doesn't Cover That

If you've ever stared at a medical bill and thought, "Why doesn't my insurance cover this?" I want you to know that the answer traces back to a bureaucratic workaround from 1943, a tax loophole that nobody planned, and a series of decisions by people who are all dead now. You're not dealing with a system. You're dealing with an accident that nobody has cleaned up in eighty-three years. Here's the origin story. During World War II, the federal government imposed wage and price controls to prevent wartime inflation. Employers who wanted to attract scarce workers couldn't offer higher salaries -- that was illegal. So they offered health benefits instead. In October 1943, the War Labor Board ruled that employer contributions to health insurance did not count as wages for the purposes of wage controls. It was a workaround. A hack. The bureaucratic equivalent of propping up a table leg with a folded napkin. Then, in 1954, Congress passed the Internal Revenue Code, Section 106, which excluded