As the costs of health care insurance continue to rise, corporate executives also rise to the occasion to impress upon the world that the employer pays most, if not all, of the cost of employer-sponsored health care insurance.  These executive suits may be well intentioned, but sadly, they're simply foisting a modern version of the free lunch on a public sorely in need of truth.  This corporate largesse is a myth, and an unfortunate one, at that.

Despite their Santa's sleigh full of benefits, all executives harbor a Grinch in back office accounting who sports a green visor and wields a sharp pencil – a financial ogre who defines the total fixed-dollar amount that a company can expend on any given employee, regardless of how that sum is disbursed between salary and benefits.

In theory, this total sum could be awarded entirely in salary or entirely in benefits.  Therefore, in reality, the company is paying for employee health care (as well as all other benefits) with the employee's own money.  Maybe the employer is the real Grinch.

The façade of a free lunch creates the illusion of spending someone else's money, a trap that reduces or eliminates incentives to use health care resources wisely.  Ironically, the free lunch rhetoric of many an economically savvy and often socially conservative executive is contributing to market inefficiencies and escalating health care costs.

The original free lunch was a curious canard born in late 19th-century American saloons, lasting a few decades until fading into culinary history by WWI.  Few gourmands are still around to remember the catch – you had to buy drinks.  The free lunch is always on you.

For the past century or so, nothing has changed.