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> 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
by 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.
- gnusty_gnurc 7y agoI’m glad this is being raised, because it’s almost never discussed in the same “why is American healthcare so screwed up” discussion. It’s also a relatively important point re: the arguments people make against for-profit healthcare, precisely because we’ve had a system for almost a century where third parties are negotiating prices with providers under heavy regulation/incentivizing of the government.
- sseveran 7y agoThere is nothing as permanent as a temporary solution.