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… is from page 120 of volume 2 of The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian [2] (2006); specifically, it’s from Alchian [3]‘s and William Meckling [4]‘s 1986 article, “The Bishops and the Lay Commission”:
Requiring employers to provide health insurance is not a conferral of new rights. Employees always have the right to contract with employers to provide health benefits as a part of their compensation package. Enacting a statute which requires employers to provide health benefits destroys employees’ rights in their persons. In contracting for the use of their services, they are coerced into accepting health benefits as part of their compensation.
The only people who deny the truth of the above statement are people who believe that health benefits can be supplied to employees by employers freely (and, hence, are withheld from employees due to employers’ sheer meanness or utter stupidity) or that employers who are forced to supply more health benefits to employees do not respond by changing their employment contracts with employees in ways that minimize employers’ costs of this mandate. In other words, the only people who deny the truth of the above statement are people who are out of touch with reality.