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> As someone who’s been 1099 as often as not for the last few years, I don’t like the idea that these things are only available to employees, and would prefer a
by awb 7y ago
> As someone who’s been 1099 as often as not for the last few years, I don’t like the idea that these things are only available to employees, and would prefer a system that priced stuff equally for temps as for the elect.
I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. Yes, it's a nice benefit, but it's not like your health needs change significantly if your job changes.
Maybe employers for dangerous jobs could offer supplementary insurance in effect at the workplace or job site. But access to affordable day to day healthcare is something we all need from birth to death without interruption.
Especially when you consider infectious disease, the health of the community impacts all of us.
- maerF0x0 7y ago> I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. +1 its unclear to me why the pricing would go down for higher number of employees? The risk profile is still spread across many people in the case of contractors.
- toast0 7y agoA small employer (or individual payer) is buying insurance, and the insurance company is going to need a good reserve because the maximum benefit is large relative to premiums. A large company often self-insures the healthcare cost, and is buying health plan administration. If high costs are not observed, the reserves can roll over to future years. Even if they don't self-insure, the possibility can be used to negotiate lower prices, and having data on past claims can show a less risky pool, etc.
- kgwgk 7y agoSelf-selection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection
- dboreham 7y agoThis is due to tax policy dating back long time.
- karljtaylor 7y agoagreed, it goes a lot further back than ww2 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114045132 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114045...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- HumblyTossed 7y ago> I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. Because the people who keep it that way are the same people you hear say dumb crap like, "I don't want to pay for someone else's healthcare (ignoring the fact that that is the definition of insurance!)" when anyone brings up changing the way healthcare is run in the US of A. They think only people who work deserve healthcare.
- macintux 7y agoI suspect there's also resistance at the corporate level. Employee retention is easier when life itself is effectively conditional on employment. You can save up enough money to pay the bills for a few months, but you effectively can't save up enough money to cover your own health care costs without some sort of insurance.
- Frost1x 7y agoThis is absolutely critical. Giving the workforce reasonably attainable healthcare decoupled from employer would increase job mobility significantly. This is a win for labor and a loss for capital owners. I would be far more willing to risk assets I had if I knew I'd still have basic necessities in life. You know, the luxuries the very wealthy have...
- orangecat 7y agoEmployee retention is easier when life itself is effectively conditional on employment. On the other hand, companies also spend significant resources being health insurance brokers. Getting rid of that burden would be particularly helpful for small businesses and startups.
- macintux 7y agoI agree, and I initially assumed that would be a more widespread attitude within the corporate world. I later found out about the retention motivation.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
- marcinzm 7y ago>I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. Yes, it's a nice benefit, but it's not like your health needs change significantly if your job changes. It's tied to employment because we have private health insurance and that doesn't really work without group plans. Employers are the most readily and widely accessible set of groups (unions are another for example).
- manigandham 7y agoEmployer as a group is completely arbitrary and can be redrawn by insurance underwriters to anything else (city, state, region, etc).
- marcinzm 7y agoInsurance underwriters can't force a city to all take insurance with their company. Which is what employer group plans do.
- manigandham 7y agoWe already had that on a federal level with ACA coverage penalties, now repealed but still enforced by California. I think it would be much more viable if we get rid of the employment requirements.
- gizmo686 7y ago> I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. During World War 2, the US implemented a national wage freeze, with an exemption for insurance and pensions. Since companies still needed to compete for workers, this led to a significant growth in those benefits.
- didgeoridoo 7y ago> I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. Pre-WW2, many unions in the US had negotiated employer-paid health insurance as a (taxable) benefit. When the government capped wages as part of wartime price controls, these unions threatened to strike, which would have gutted industrial production. To avoid a strike, the government offered to temporarily make employer-provided health insurance a tax-free benefit. Temporarily. And here we still are.
- slg 7y agoAs software developers we can probably empathize. I know I have been working on production code and found years old comments written by me along the following lines: //Hacky solution to get a working prototype, should be refactored before deployment. Legislative and regulatory debt can be a problem just like technical debt.
- Ericson2314 7y ago> Legislative and regulatory debt can be a problem just like technical debt I really wish there was more appreciation for this outside of tech. I'm disdainful of a lot of SV libertarianism, to say the least, but will gladly make common cause on this one point.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoDebt implies that we know there is a shortcoming and want/need to fix it, but don't have the time or knowledge. The healthcare situation in the US may have started out as a hacky WW2 era fix, but has been explicitly and aggressively lobbied against for years at the highests levels of government. Framing it in a technocratic context as "technical debt, but for laws and stuff" completely misses the intense crusade against it in the US.
- Ericson2314 7y agoI'm not sure it misses the point. Technical debt is always poltical too, whether it's system admin / database admin work being automated away (or not!), or manager<->engineer friction on costs and deadlines.