Parts of the plan I could see happening:

• Employers scrapping all employer-based health coverage.

Parts I don't see happening:

• Employees getting this mondo pay raise.
• Employee compensation rising over the years to stay even with health care costs.
• Employees (or Americans in general) actually being offered sane and affordable health care options via this HHA or anyone else.

If this plan is pushed through the end result will, I suspect, in fact be just to absolve employers of their employee health care costs while not actually helping said employees.

I agree with Chris - I don't even see how you could legislate the pay raise. There are so many ways for the employer to get around it - he can give you the raise and then immediately give you a pay cut, for example. Or do it two months later. Or look for a replacement for you at pay levels sans raise.

The only thing that might possibly make the raise happen, at least to some extent, is that people are used to a certain compensation level and if one company suddenly drops its compensation level (no insurance, no raise) while most of the others haven't done anything yet to get rid of the raise, what employees will see is that (1) their company is screwing them and (2) other companies aren't screwing THEIR employees and they will perhaps leave. If you write the law correctly, market inertia is on its side.

If payroll taxes are used to fund the extra insurance, then the raises should be commensurately less. As written it sounded like that burden was being put on employers' profits. The employers are going to make a lot more trouble if they, rather than the employees, must soak up that extra cost. You could maybe get them to be more on-board with it if you straight-out said that the employees will pick up the cost of insuring the poor people, so the employer gets zero payroll tax but the employees pay sales tax on their own insurance payments.