Most low paying jobs have no health insurance benefits for their employees at all. Most of the ones who do have it, don't really do anything except take money out of the pockets of the employees, but don't cover much, if anything at all. I don't know anything about Starbuck's employee benefits, but if they're as good as you say, they are a very small minority among lower paying jobs.

Troll's comment about systems where the bottom line drives the quality of medical care, perfectly describes the system we have here.

Also, one of the things we say we like better about a country like the US as opposed to, for instance, socialist and communist countries, is the idea that we have the freedom to live and work where we want to. As long as our insurance is tied to where we work, we really do not have this freedom. As long as our insurance is tied to where we work, we will either have to work for the companies that offer good insurance benefits (many do not), or we will have to forgo adequate health care. This is not freedom of choice.

We don't need to create a national medical care system in order to correct this situation. All we need to do is use the economy of scale that is possible with pooling the resources of the entire tax base, to provide the same insurance people who have good insurance benefits have, only it would not be tied to where we work. Corporations use the same kind of system on a smaller scale. It's a good system... it just is inefficient to have it tied to a person's place of employment. Even US businesses recognize this. Businesses in the US would be much more competitive in the world market if their employees' access to medical care was not tied to where they work. This system puts businesses in the US at a disadvantage compared to their counterparts in most developed countries.