During WWII, the Germans were bombing cities in England. Many English took to the countryside.
When they needed health care, they went to a doctor in the countryside. Being refugees, they couldn't pay. The doctors billed the UK government. The government paid. Because it was wartime and everyone had banded together for unity and the common good.
After the war was over, Britain just continued that same system, more or less.
The British system was born of common purpose, a belief in the unity of the nation, the feeling that circumstances should not deny you health care. It continues to serve those goals and ideals today.
During WWII, nobody was bombing American cities, but we did have wage and price controls. These wage controls prevented private business from bidding for ever scarcer labor by offering money, so businesses, eager to profit at the time of war, looked for other means to attract employees.
What they found was a loophole in the law for non-cash benefits. Like providing health insurance. So employer sponsored group insurance was made popular as a means to evade the law, escape social responsibility, increase private profits, at the expense of the nation, and the common good, even during a time of war.
After the war was over, the US continued on the same system, building on it, subsidizing it with tax breaks, but more or less continuing it.
Two points:
a) The essay that I cribbed this from, and that I can't remember the source now, argued that people stick with what they know. Both the US and UK only did something really new during the stress of the war. After the war, they both largely stuck with whatever was in place.
b) The UK system was created as a social good and an act of national unity. In contrast:
Our system was created as an anti social, profit making, government control evading, instrument of putting business over the good of the country.
How can we be surprised that seventy years later it's still operating as planned and originally conceived?
Its anti social results are not a bug, but a feature. Its emphasis on private profit over public good is not a bug, but a feature. It was never meant to make the US a stronger country, it was meant to profit regardless of country.
Those senators who speak of their deep concern that the proposed reforms might interfere with private profit are simply articulating the purpose of the system they have known and built upon their entire lives. We should LISTEN to them tell us what the system is good for, and really change it.