First of all, we need to address, and put to rest, the ridiculous treatment of the term 'freeloader' in this thread. Nearly every post from the right-wing/libertarians in this thread has attempted to shift this term in to the moral realm, and then ridicule it. This is simply, completely inappropriate given the context we have been using. It turns out that a decade (and the rest!) out of school has made me forget some things. But fortunately, the only thing I've forgotten here is that I should have referred to a 'free rider' not a 'freeloader'.
The free rider problem is a question of externalities, and it's solution involves pricing the externality into existing markets. In many cases this means either regulation, or taxes.
But the term freeloader is so much more colorful.
Eskimo is the one who initially used it so I can see why you may have just kept up the practice.
Even the "free rider" moniker wouldn't have helped alleviate my objections to what was being asserted about employers. I simply do not see them as "those who consume more than their fair share of a resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its production." First of all they do pay taxes into the government, their employees may be paying into the government via taxes. If they did not exist the government would be on the hook for an even larger share of these employees well being. Secondly I don't see them as consuming a resource in the first place by not providing health insurance.
Since we aren't talking about morality here these employers could replace the few employees who die from the lack of health care coverage much more cheaply than covering all of them with HCI. I really think the number of people who die because they don't have insurance is minuscule. We're just going to add another burden to employers here to fix a problem that isn't as large as it was made out to be, in my opinion.
As far as I'm concerned the only way you can get employers "on the hook" for HCI is if you make moral arguments. It's much easier and more cost effective to simply replace these low skill workers than to provide them with health insurance.
Now back to Health Care:
The reason that death is part of this thread is that it's part of the debate. It is a valid position to say that those who cannot afford to pay for care in the private market (whether that is insurance or pay-as-you-go) should receive no care. This is precisely how the market for Ferraris, guitars, and Grade AAA sirloin works.
It is not valid to hold this position, and refuse to acknowledge that this means people will die of conditions which need not cause death. This facet can be abused to create an appeal to emotion, but the fact of it is correct, and unavoidable.
The main reason we want to avoid unnecessary deaths is because we have a moral compunction to do so. We don't want people to die if they didn't have to. This is why we have laws that people have to be treated in ERs whether they can pay or not. It is our morality that dictates that somebody else pays for people who can't pay for themselves. If we weren't moral we'd let them die in the streets. Without our morality we wouldn't need to find somebody to pay.
The basic existing system in the USA is 'patient pays if they can', but there is a large part of the population that falls on the wrong side of that 'if' for one reason or another. The fact that there is a safety net that applies in more than very limited cases becomes a market distortion. It means I can now purchase the labor of an employee for less than the cost of 'keeping that employee alive', because someone else is paying for their healthcare. In an ordinary market, we know there are conditions that can temporarily cause goods to be sold above or below marginal cost, but that the market will return to an equilibrium. But here we have a case where this distortion is permanent.
The bolded part is the responsibility of the individual ultimately and our fellow country man since we are a basically moral society. The employer is already doing more than their fair share by employing the worker in the first place.