Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"This is becoming a bigger and bigger problem as more people are changing jobs more frequently over their work career. And really, the answer to your question goes back, curiously, to World War II. During World War II the government imposed controls on wages and salaries. That is to say, businesses were limited on how much they could increase someone's pay. But the government did not control benefits like health insurance. And so what businesses did in lieu of giving someone a pay raise, they, for example, added or improved their health insurance. Actually, the business also got tax benefits for doing that. And so this is held over to today and it is really why most of us get tied to our job vis-a-vis our health insurance. Now if we want to make health insurance portable, what we would have to do is break that tie, that link, between health insurance and the business. That could be done in two ways. One, it could be done by taking that tax benefit that businesses get by providing health insurance away or to give a similar tax benefit to people who buy their health insurance directly. And many are calling for this kind of change. They say in this kind of modern economy where people move around a lot we need to make health insurance portable."