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Good (edit: in the long run). The services they list, like health insurance, retirement, or pensions, should be decoupled from your employer.
by SamReidHughes 9y ago
Good (edit: in the long run). The services they list, like health insurance, retirement, or pensions, should be decoupled from your employer.
- z_open 9y agoIdeally they would be coupled to our government, but since they aren't providing that, our employers should be obligated to ensure they are providing us with the means to keep ourselves healthy.
- wincy 9y agoWe should be able to get health insurance and bargain based on community groups or individually tax-free rather than by employer. If the entire Mormon church could collective bargain for health insurance for its members it would be WAY cheaper than any employer (because they don't drink alcohol or smoke).
- maxxxxx 9y agoJust make one big risk pool nationwide. Easy to administer .
- adventured 9y agoThe parent was suggesting a superior risk pool. One big risk pool nation-wide isn't superior. The bottom 50% of healthcare consumers represent a mere 3% of all healthcare spending each year. That's the ideal risk pool, we know who that pool consists of: overwhelmingly younger people. 5% of healthcare consumers, are responsible for about 50% of all healthcare costs. That pool consists overwhelmingly of people over the age of 50. That's the high risk pool. Including them into any pool, isn't an improvement to the pool's cost structure. What you're arguing for is that including them is superior morally. That's a perfectly legitimate premise obviously. It's radically inferior financially/economically, if we're talking about building risk pools.
- walshemj 9y agoWell eventually those young people will be over 50 and make more call on health services.
- maxxxxx 9y agoPicking risk pools is not smart and I doubt it's economical either in the long run. You can pick young, healthy people first. That works for a while but then these people get older. Now you have to kick them out. This is good for short term profit but you can't run a system like that long term. If you eliminate thinking about risk pools and just insure the whole country the same you can also eliminate a lot of bureaucracy.
- qwerty456127 9y agoCan't it actually do this? Can't a club of people establish a nonprofit and buy insurance collectively somewhat the way corporations do?
- virmundi 9y agoProbably not. States set what insurance can allow. If your state blocks small groups from getting insurance, then you’re out in the cold. http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2011/05/02/group-health-insurance-employer.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2011/05/02/group-health-...
- qwerty456127 9y ago> States set what insurance can allow. Why? From my perspective the whole problem with healthcare and insurance is these are way far from a free markets. Wouldn't it be better if the insurance companies would just look at what people want and offer just that for the prices that make both sides interested?
- virmundi 9y agoI don't think the states should have much power over this particular market. Insurance definitionally crosses state bounds. If I get in a car accident in Kentucky, Florida blue still pays my bills. This is clearly a federal commerce clause issue. If that's the case, the Feds should bust the limits. Specifically I was replying to the idea of incorporating a large group outside the bounds of a company for insurance purposes. As it stands, the states may block it.
- zrail 9y agoThis is something that is coming down the pike with the changes the current administration has made for "association health plans". They solve some micro problems (healthy self-employed people will be able to buy cheap group health insurance without being part of a traditional employer group) while also making the overall problem much worse (the individual exchanges become a de-facto high risk dumping ground and get way more expensive). This is a problem for high income self-employed people with preexisting conditions. They probably won't be able to buy into an association health plan and they won't get premium subsidies from the government because they make too much, which means their premiums will be a ridiculous percentage of their income. I switched from self-employed contracting to full time W2 with my biggest client back in December. The biggest reason is because they offered to pay for very good small group health insurance.
- tzahola 9y agoMy government takes a 20% cut from my salary for the exact same reason. Nevertheless, our public health care is so shitty that every self-respecting employer includes private healthcare in their package. So the government is basically forcing me to pay for something that I don’t intend to use (because I don’t want to die from nosocomial infections in a moldy hospital room).
- qwerty456127 9y agoWould you mind sharing the country name? I am sure (because I've tried it myself) the quality standards differ by orders of magnitude in different countries where it works this way.
- tzahola 9y agoHungary
- pathseeker 9y agoThat's historically the way it has been but it's absurd in general. Would you argue the same thing about housing, food, and water (they should all be provided by the employer)? Really what we need is an expectation of being able to buy healthcare on our own with regular incomes.
- gambiting 9y agoNo, the american approach is beyond absurd. Of course my employer should pay into(government ran) healthcare on my behalf. Of course they should pay into a pension plan. And yes, currently, if I stay beyond my mandated 7.5 hours, my employer has to provide food during that time. My employer also has to provide water during working hours. If my employer asks me to go somewhere on company business, they have to provide housing.
- pc86 9y agoI wait with bated breath for the day we can have serious conversations about these topics without these ridiculous posts intentionally misrepresenting the other person's argument.
- rectang 9y agoWe can't have a reasonable conversation about it because it's a zero-sum war between labor and capital. It's not possible to decide issues such as benefits on the basis of what's best for the economy because where the benefits come from doesn't have a big macro-economic impact. What this argument is about is who gets how much of the pie.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoCompared to America's current health care regulations it's not zero sum at all.
- rectang 9y ago
- nitwit005 9y agoWhy would you want that? I mean it. Why should your employer pick your health care, returement savings, or life insurance choices? Even if the best case where they act if your best interest, you have to deal with all your benefits changing when you change jobs.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoHow do you get a 401k match from a private company? If all contractors are making 20% above a FTE, that's fine, but that's a decent chunk of change if you're high salary.
- neogodless 9y agoWhile you don't get a 401k match as a freelancer or contractor, ideally you can get hourly rates to make up some of the difference. The rest can come from registering as a company, setting up a solo 401(k) - in the U.S. anyway - and then putting up to ~$54,000 of your income into a retirement fund pre-tax. That's a pretty significant potential tax savings.
- virmundi 9y agoThe other thing to think about is flexibility in not being in an employer backed 401k. When I was in one the best average return was 4%. Independently I can get 15% through etfs that track the S&P. I can also get 30-50% playing in riskier tens like oil or commodities. While some argue against that, at least I now have the agency to decide.
- trevyn 9y agoVanguard seems to be a pretty popular option among employers these days, and they have nice low-fee S&P funds.
- qwerty456127 9y agoI agree absolutely. Corporations should only pay employees money (including whatever amount it takes to buy reasonable insurance etc) and that should be up to the employee to choose an insurance company and pay them. Insurance companies should compete targeting not corporations but people as their customers.
- module0000 9y agoTell it your elected official, because the law currently obliges your employer to subsidize your insurance if they have greater than <X> employees. This is not evil corporations pushing their insurance choice upon you, it's government pushing employee insurance mandates on corporations. If that bothers you(enough to compel you to take political action), then vote or write your elected official. If your elected official ignores you, then consider that you are not the majority, or your elected official simply does not care, and is motivated by something other than their constituents well being.
- ryandrake 9y agoIf companies were, all of a sudden, no longer required to subsidize health insurance, who wants to bet that they will immediately pass all the savings on to each employee in the form of a raise? I guarantee you shareholders pocket the difference.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoWhy don't companies just give everybody a pay cut and pocket that difference, too?
- danans 9y agoBecause doing it that way would be a public relations disaster, and likely destabilize the company. The way they do it is by layoffs and planned attrition to return to growth. I'm sure everyone has seen a stock price jump when large scale layoffs are announced.
- 40acres 9y agoI agree, however our government is not up to the task. Ever since Congress passed Obamacare it has been in a fight to survive, instead of trying to improve the system (which has clear benefits) Republicans have spent the past few years trying to dismantle it along with other "entitlements". The American worker is getting squeezed on both sides, private employers are offering less and less and government is not picking up the slack. The void will be filled, either by a private corporation or government, but if it's not you can say bye to the middle class.
- korethr 9y agoAs I recall, Obamacare didn't do much, if anything, to decouple health plans from employment. If anything it made it more tightly coupled, by mandating employers with more than so many full-time employees provide health plans. The individual mandate didn't decouple health plans from employers, it just provided additional insult to injury by causing those whom were un- or under-employed and couldn't afford a now even more expensive full price health plan to be facing an even larger tax bill at the end of the year. Any other good or bad effects from Obamacare notwithstanding, if you want to decouple health plans from employment and specific employers, Obamacare is the wrong direction.
- TheCoelacanth 9y agoIt did quite a bit to make it easier to buy insurance as an individual such as getting rid of pre-existing condition exclusions and adding subsidies for low income people.
- 40acres 9y agoI mentioned Obamacare as more of a government solution to the problems mentioned in the parent post but I agree. However remember that Obamacare provides and individual insurance market at the state level (which is doing terribly..) along with medicaid expansion. These seem closer to the ideal of what American 'single payer' would look like.
- prepend 9y agoThe creation of exchanges for purchases and removal of preexisting conditions as exclusions made it much more possible to buy insurance outside of group plans. I contracted for a few years and it was impossible to get insurance at a reasonable cost because of an extremely common health condition that’s never caused complication in my life. So I was only able to get insurance through employers.