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“One thing that’s surprisingly inexpensive for a lot of our clients is health insurance. The insurance policy for members of SAG-AFTRA is amazing. For the money

• JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > It really shows how us Plebians are ground into dust by the healthcare industry Or the benefits of collective bargaining, even in limited context like procuring healthcare.
  • carlmr 8y ago
    This is one of things I always wonder about. Libertarians and other free-market enthusiasts should actually be for collective bargaining and unions. Because in an actual free market it's legal to form unions, just like it's legal to form a corporation. Collective bargaining is a feature of a free market. If you don't like the idea of unions and collective bargaining, you don't like free markets.
    • rorykoehler 8y ago
      Actual libertarians rather than the confused type so popular in the US are all for it. Look at anarcho-syndacilists for example
      • RA_Fisher 8y ago
        Yep. Though we're a rare breed I'll admit, I'm an American libertarian and I'm supportive of unions and collective bargaining. I have a caveat in that I don't support laws that interfere with such bargaining or artificially increase one party's market power (closed shop laws). In the US this identifies me as being "right to work" which is often seen as anti-union. For example I don't support the UAW due to their long history of using the state to increase their market power.
        • carlmr 8y ago
          >For example I don't support the UAW due to their long history of using the state to increase their market power. That's a fair caveat from a libertarian standpoint. It's just that most of the self-declared libertarians I meet seem to have the idea that the state should forbid unions from interfering with their idea of a free market. Which sounds very unlibertarian to me.
          • RA_Fisher 8y ago
            I agree that does sound unlibertarian too me too.
        • marcoperaza 8y ago
          When people say they “support unions” they mean that they support laws that “artificially increase one side’s bargaining power”, which you say you don’t. The most important of such laws are ones that inhibit employers from replacing striking workers.
          • AstralStorm 8y ago
            Without this law and the corollary of reasonable firing (as in with a lawful reason), unions are dead on arrival as anyone willing to unionize will get fired on the spot. This is similar to the procedural loophole of registering manifestations where the mayor or other redeposit body can virtually countermand the right to organize. It happens all the time.
            • marcoperaza 8y ago
              I 100% agree and should have said that in the original post. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about those laws (though I flat out oppose attempts to require cause for firings in general), but I mainly wanted to point out that principled libertarians trying to square the circle, the way the person I was relying to was, are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Unions can only exist and be effective, in the vast majority of cases, because the state uses its coercive power to give them artificially-inflated bargaining power. Whether that’s for the better or worse is a different question.
      • FussyZeus 8y ago
        ^ This. The only thing that I really have against unions is that so many make it difficult to get a job where they operate, and on the flip side, require membership to work at a given employer. If a union's benefits are so good (and they often are) then there shouldn't be a need to put people in against their will.
      • wafflesraccoon 8y ago
        Gatekeeping who is and isn't an "Actual libertarian"
        • throwawaymath 8y ago
          That's not really gatekeeping. In order for words to have meaning they have to preclude the set of all things they are not. There is a cogent argument that support of collective bargaining is compatible with the philosophical school of libertarianism, and that a liberatarian subscribing to that school of thought would consequently support it. It's not necessarily self-evident, and you can argue against it if you'd like, but then it's simply a disagreement. Gatekeeping implies an unreasonable barrier being imposed on an ingroup or social identity (not typically a political or philosophical school of thought). For example, "you're not really a fan of <band> if you can't name all the songs from their <obscure album>." People disagree about the finer points of political ideas all the time. But drawing a line in the sand doesn't immediately signify gatekeeping, it signifies normal debate. This is especially evident if you compare the example I gave to what you're calling gatekeeping: it would be unreasonable to require all fans of a band to have episodic recollection and deep opinions on every song ever recorded by the band. But it would not be unreasonable to assume a libertarian with philosophical fidelity to the school of thought supports collective bargaining. Again, it might not be correct, but it's not ridiculous. As a meta point, I'm noticing a trend online where people will give a quick driveby dismissal using terms from the popular zeitgeist. Typical, recent examples include "gatekeeping", "whataboutism" and "gaslighting." Sometimes these are appropriate criticisms to levy at someone's argument and they draw a real insight. But they're also frequently abused or pigeonholed into discussion in contrived ways. From my perspective this seems like a more subtle equivalent of collecting logical fallacies to point out in other people's arguments online. It's symptomatic of something larger: that snark is the modern saboteur of reasoned debate. Very, very rarely is a single sentence critique of another person's point anything more than a middle brow dismissal. It sounds intellectual but there's no deconstruction or antithesis involved. If you wanted to substantially critique the commenter's point, it would probably have been more appropriate to cite "No True Scotsman" instead of "Gatekeeping". Better still would be to skip the trite idiom altogether and explain why you consider it an error with substantive depth. A pithy comment only convinces those who already agree with you. A meaningfully persuasive one convinces the audience, if not the original commenter.
    • otherme1234 8y ago
      As a libertarian, what bothers me is the mandatory union. If you want to unionize, go on a strike or whatever, I'm OK with that. But if I don't want to, respect me and leave me alone.
      • pwinnski 8y ago
        This is a variation on the tragedy of the commons. For each person, the most advantageous outcome is if everybody but them participates in a union. The end result is that nobody participates in a union, making things worse for everybody.
    • edanm 8y ago
      > Libertarians and other free-market enthusiasts should actually be for collective bargaining and unions. This depends on what you mean by "be for collective bargaining". As in most things, the details matter, and the slogan "be for unions" is almost meaningless. In the sense that people should be able to form and/or join unions etc, then absolutely, I think most libertarians would be totally for it. But often when people say you're for or against unions, they're talking about specific laws with specific consequences. For example, should an employer have the right to fire an employee who is attempting to start a union? A libertarian might well say that both sides have liberties that shouldn't be taken away in this case. If the employee manages to start a union and gets collective bargaining power - good for them! But the government shouldn't intrude on the employer's right to fire employees if it so chooses, no matter what the cause. Another example - many countries have laws that say that if some percentage of the workforce, say 30%, agrees to form a union, then all employees are now automatically part of that union. This makes it much easier to form unions, obviously, and you might make the case that it helps protect the usually-less-powerful employees from the usually-more-powerful employer. On the other hand, this often means that individual employees don't have the freedom to negotiate their own specific terms with the employers, even if they prefer not to be part of the union. Or that the employees now must pay money into the union, whether they want to or not. Again, all of these are legitimate debates and most of the sides of this can be defended. But the slogan "you should be for collective bargaining and unions" just doesn't include enough nuance to even being to address how you should react to each of the above - which are the specific laws that people are talking about when talking about unions.
      • beat 8y ago
        Thanks for pointing out the bargaining power asymmetry problem. Asymmetries in power are fundamental to how markets work, but when most people say "free market", they mean some imaginary world where buyer and seller have exactly the same power.
    • savanaly 8y ago
      I support free markets because they tend to distribute scarce resources efficiently, and monopoly disrupts that. A union is, roughly, an attempt to form a monopoly and charge a price above the market price, which our first expectation should lead us to think will cause a deadweight loss and drop in employment, although there will be some rents to the workers that keep their jobs which of course is why they are trying to do it.
      • jeffreyrogers 8y ago
        That's true if you have a free market, but the healthcare market is not free due to supply restrictions (can't make new doctors easily), demand restrictions (employer or government bears most of the cost, but patients are consuming healthcare services), and complex regulatory things that increase overhead. So an idealogically pure libertarian would argue that unions are bad, but a more pragmatic libertarian could argue that unions are bad overall, but might help address some of the current problems with the healthcare system.
        • savanaly 8y ago
          I guess I interpreted the argument as being about workers and employers, with healthcare cost as a given, with the debate mainly being about how much the employer should subsidize healthcare. Which basically amounts to how high should the wage be since you can lump in any subsidy to healthcare with the standard wage and consider that the entire compensation package that's being negotiated over. And in the case of software engineers specifically, which is what I responded to, the market has a lot of buyers and sellers.
      • beat 8y ago
        Isn't that what corporations are, too?
        • savanaly 8y ago
          Corporations can take on a role as a monopolist but it's not inherent to their nature. I would hazard to say that most corporations are in a market where they can't affect the equilibrium market price of the good they're selling by very much, and thus don't resemble a union in that respect.
    • beat 8y ago
      Agreeing with this and referencing Peter Thiel, which I do a lot. In Zero to One, Thiel argues that the pure, ideal free markets that politicians and economists dream of drive profits to zero. Think about the math - it's obvious. You see this in high competition markets for effectively identical products, like groceries or gas stations. Razor-thin margins. The only way to profit is via some sort of localized monopoly, which is what "unique value proposition" of any sort actually means. This isn't a defense of old-school robber baron monopolies (which break the math in the other direction), but it's to Thiel's broader ideas about how to build a high profit company. The need for labor unions is a product of the free market, and a way to build a unique value proposition. With employees that are totally fungible, totally replaceable parts, the marginal value of labor itself is driven to zero. Wages become a race to the bottom, and working becomes unprofitable. But by saying "Only members of the union can work here", the union sharply decreases the available labor pool, thus creating a unique value proposition. In other words, it's a market response to a market problem. The people who call for "free markets" and rail against unions basically don't understand what it is they're asking for. They're in love with an ideal, not thinking about how profit actually works in the real world, as a function of economics. It's straight-up ignorance reinforced by puritan idealism.
      • beat 8y ago
        Dug up a relevant quote, just for kicks... "Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business." - Peter Theil, Zero to One
    • golergka 8y ago
      As long as there are few different competing unions, none of which has any special status in the law, I'm all for it. Sadly, that's rarely the case.
    • Felz 8y ago
      Unions almost invariably require government regulated support, because collective anything rarely stands on its own before people defect. I think that's a general good feature of the free market. Collusion is hard until you get down to only a few providers of a service. (In this case, labor.) The real problem here is that employees generally have no power, because they have no flexibility. We have a nationwide, intergenerational case of people living paycheck to paycheck when even modest savings would've lead to fantastic wealthbuilding. In short, we wouldn't need unions if employees had a BATNA. This is a financial education problem. But it's one that could be temporarily solved by susbsidizing a BATNA for workers, rather than enforcing labor laws that lead directly to inefficiency.
• majewsky 8y ago
  /me goes to sign up for acting lessons
  • joezydeco 8y ago
    The card is a lot harder to get than taking a few classes.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• Brotkrumen 8y ago
  There has to be a catch. Maybe high copays? 1500$ a year is ridiculously cheap
  • isostatic 8y ago
    Typical health care costs in developed countries is on the $3k-$5k per person per year range [0] (The U.S. is nearly $10k a year) However, on average the U.S. government (thus taxpayer) funds half of the health care costs, meaning that the private sector has to fund about $5k per person per year. That would suggest the SAG employer is paying $3500 a year and the SAG employee $1500 a year. [0] https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
    • jorvi 8y ago
      Here in The Netherlands we pay ~€90~€120 premium to insurers. The €90 package only gives you access to select hospitals per region for non-emergency care, and you aren’t covered for ‘extras’ like physiotherapy. The €120 package is pretty much the ‘all-in’ package. On top of that you have a ~€380 deductible. Everything except medicine costs goes from this deductible first. If you really trust your health (or have the money to cover it) you can raise the deductible to ~€800, which will drop your monthly premium by ~€20. GP visits are free and act as a sort of filter for access to the ‘real’ healthcare system. Anything minor (prescriptions for various minor diseases, mole removal, etc) goes through him and if he thinks something warrants further research you get blood work done or see a specialist, waiting times usually 1 week, 2 weeks tops. All in all its a really nice ‘hybrid’ sort of system. It isn’t 100% socialized like some countries around us, but the end result is that we have the best healthcare system in Europe (and thus probably the world) :)
      • isostatic 8y ago
        It's fairly irellevent who pays, everyone ends up paying in the end. The Netherlands spends $5385 per year per person on healthcare, 80% of that is spent by the government. The UK spends $4192 per year, again 80% is by the government. The UK has trickier cost areas to handle too (healthcare in Scottish islands is far more per person than in Rotterdam) Measuring the objective quality of a health care system is almost impossible (it varies dramatically on your subjective priorities), let alone measuring value per dollar, but I don't think I've ever seen one that claims the Netherlands is better than Scanadavian ones.
• andy_ppp 8y ago
  Seems incredibly cheap - is being a beautiful celebrity correlated with never getting ill?
  • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    Looks like their employers pick up the tab. http://www.sagaftraplans.org/employers http://www.sagaftraplans.org/employers
• ivankelly 8y ago
  Perhaps it's a scam to keep celebrities disinterested in healthcare reform.
• jgh 8y ago
  I have a feeling most people in SAG-AFTRA aren't millionaires.
• lotsofpulp 8y ago
  It's missing the component that the employer is paying. I doubt doctors, hospitals, and drug manufacturers are selling to SAG-AFTRA for less than to other similar size organizations. But SAG-AFTRA was able to negotiate better contributions from employers. As someone linked below, you can actually see here that employer is kicking in another 15%+ for premiums, which at $50k per year is $625 per month and at $100k per year is $1250 per month: http://www.sagaftraplans.org/employers/agreements http://www.sagaftraplans.org/employers/agreements Employer portion plus at least $133 from the employee = at least $500-$600 per month, if not $1,200+ for the higher earners which seems about what you get on healthcare.gov. I didn't look into what deductibles and copays were, but I'd be surprised if it was much lower than what most employer based health insurance plans offer.
• firstplacelast 8y ago
  Actually, it shows you plebeians the power of unions. I have a handful of friends that work in Hollywood as actors and producers. They get paid amazingly well and get insane amounts of time off. ...all because they have organized labor. Most people would be amazed how much an extra gets paid once they have their SAG card. Many take advantage of unemployment as well since they typically work on contracts. Have several friends that will work for 6 months on a show and then take 3-4 months off while collecting unemployment and figuring out what contract they want to take next.
• weeksie 8y ago
  I can assure you that the majority of SAG actors are working service jobs, living hand to mouth. This isn't an example of the rich lording over the plebs, this is an example of a union doing right by its members.
  • knuththetruth 8y ago
    Yeah. All tech workers could have similar benefits if they unionized en masse using a structure similar to that of actors.
    • walshemj 8y ago
      And actually tech workers have a lot of similarities to those in entertainment (both front and back of house) larger numbers of nerodiverse members than the population at large for example. The Biggest tech union on the UK just merged with BECTU (the eqvielent of IATSE)
    • charlieflowers 8y ago
      Ok, let's do it. healthcare premiums and coverage suck. i actually started googling how to join SAG.
    • dizzystar 8y ago
      Getting into and maintaining SAG membership is very time consuming and expensive. You could work in the industry for years and never get in. Others get lucky and get in within a few months. A lot of people are SAG Eligible but can't afford the initial fees to get in. It's not like a standard union where you show up to work every day for months and you are in. Non-union basically do the exact same thing as union folk, but get paid less per hour. In contrast, there is a budget limit to how many SAG workers can be on set, so while your hourly is higher, the quantity of work you have is much lower. Most SAG members are background extras, who don't earn very much money, and can't work more if they wanted to. Definitely not the union you'd want to emulate. Film and TV actors are all temporary workers.
      • knuththetruth 8y ago