10 ms·

Universal Healthcare would be the most useful thing that could happen to help gig workers.

it_citizen 4y ago
Definitely the first and biggest step in the right direction. But it would mostly be, well, catching up on most western countries. However those countries are also complaining about gig workers being taken advantage of.
stetrain 4y ago
Also labor competition in general, and self-employment, and small businesses...
propogandist 4y ago
Make their VCs pay for health care, they subsidize everything else. Most of the companies in this space make no money, and should be shutdown anyway.
- Eleison23 4y ago
  This will not happen, and the reason is that Obamacare made a great effort to decouple health care insurance and benefits from the employer. Since insurance is now available for purchase on the open marketplace, there are whole classes of employers who don't need to worry about including it in their benefits packages which they offer. It would be a step backwards to require or force companies to include it, especially to gig workers or contract employees; they should simply compensate them enough that they can afford to purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace. If you do not like this structure then you should have worked to block Obamacare from becoming law, because that was a primary objective of the legislation: to decouple health care plans from large companies and employers, and make that insurance more accessible, on the free market, to more workers than ever before.
  - propogandist 4y ago
    >they should simply compensate them enough that they can afford to purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace. agreed, but they won't. Most of the "gig" companies are exploitative parasites.
  - orangecat 4y ago
    That was one of the good parts of the ACA, although it also inexplicably added employer insurance mandates that created predictable perverse incentives (e.g. employees being limited to less than 30 hours/week). The whole thing is ridiculous: your employer should have no more involvement with your health care or insurance than they do with your food or housing.
    - VBprogrammer 4y ago
      From outside the US looking in health care being in any way related to employment just seems nuts.
  - jwolfe 4y ago
    > Obamacare made a great effort to decouple health care insurance and benefits from the employer Did it? There was lots of talk at the time about how you get to keep your private plan. And the actual text of the ACA mandated that large employers offer health insurance, which was not the case before the ACA. What provisions in the ACA made great efforts to decouple them? i.e., which provisions incentivized individuals to not be on employer plans, or employers not to offer them?
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Actually, the primary objective of the ACA is in the name...Affordable Care. And if that's the metric, it's not achieving its goal. We should also remember that the promise was to lower prices by legally forcing the younger (read: less likely to use services) to sign up. That didn't last long. Editorial: This is why everyone calls it Obamacare. The Reps love the knock. The Dems are not wanting to remind anyone Affordable is in the name. Note: I'm not knocking ACA per se. We should have health care. The issue is ACA is a fine example of: good idea, poor execution. And no one has the will to fix what is by most accounts not living up to its promise or need.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Uber, Lyft, and Doordash are public. VCs are just shareholders at this point.
treeman79 4y ago
Everyone can have care like the VA!
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Realistically, yes. Best case, it looks like Kiaser. They're private, but they're both the insurer and provider, and they compete in the market. Realistically, it looks more like the post office or the DMV.
  - shakezula 4y ago
    Having received healthcare services in countries with socialized healthcare, no it doesn’t look like that at all.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      Have you ever going through airport customs in Europe and compared it to the US? Sure, other places can do these things well, but the US doesn't have a track record of competent government services.
      - d4mi3n 4y ago
        I hear USPS worked phenomenally well until it became a political target. I think the issue is less that we can’t and more that we won’t support or improve these systems for ideological reasons.
        abigail95 4y ago
        USPS is a sanctioned monopoly with a USO. It's illegal to compete with it. It's like saying AT&T "worked". Sure you could buy a phone service and pay $$$$ for it, but if I had a better way of running it, they would put me in jail for trying.
        sudosysgen 4y ago
dehrmann 4y ago
There is something weird about government telling business a benefit is so important they have to provide it, but it's apparently not important enough for government to provide it.
- junofan 4y ago
  Didn’t the government create a marketplace where people can buy health insurance? If people don’t want to use it, why force it?
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    Two problems - one is adverse selection, the other is that uninsured people still get care anyway (showing up at the ER) and somebody has to pay for it. Right now we do it by bankrupting every 20th person that walks through the door, which seems rather unfair.
    - a-user-you-like 4y ago
      It used to be, and should be again, that the hospital owner or physician would foot the bill if you couldn’t pay. Much more direct charity, a beautiful thing. Taxing everyone to hell to cover every health expense is immoral.
      - dividefuel 4y ago
        How is it more moral to force someone to provide care for free than it is to tax the populace to provide universal care?
        a-user-you-like 4y ago
        I wish those advocating universal taxing for crappy care would take the moral high road and not rob his fellow citizen to pay for his bills. Instead, let his fellow citizen give freely in love. Universal healthcare is such a moral sham, and what we have now in the US is also pretty bad. There is a better way.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, it would also shift the balance of power from employers to workers. And even the Dems are hardly pro-labor at this point, to say nothing of all the powers that don't want empowered workers (and will do - and can do - what's necessary to prevent that).
jnwatson 4y ago
It would help startups too.
mc32 4y ago
They could also make it harder to off-shore work and off-shore production to cut costs which in turn would make the lower skilled workforce "more desirable" and needed.
cal5k 4y ago
A lot of Americans seem to not understand what exactly this would entail. Like, the details really matter. Would it be federal, or state-wide? How would it be funded? Would it be public "option", or would private pay be banned like in Canada? How would compensation rates be updated, and how often? Ask any hospital administrator what they think of Medicare/Medicaid rates, and they'll probably answer that they're set too low and that they lose money on Medicare/Medicaid patients. The details on "universal healthcare" can range from heavily-regulated private insurance - Germany for example - to outright bans on private pay for items insured by the government (Canada). A lot of Americans seem to want some sort of federal system that provides insurance for everything, which seems like the best way to get the most expensive, least capable system imaginable. Imagine having yet another insanely expensive, totally underfunded entitlement program that politicians can continuously pad with new promises every 2-4 years when they need to get re-elected. The Canadian experience (source: Canadian currently living in the US) is one you do not want to replicate, so be wary - Canadians have little confidence in their system at this point, even though it's quite expensive relative to European peers - and we have shockingly low numbers of imaging machines, hospital beds, urgent care clinics, etc. per capita, all well having administrative bloat that makes university administration look positively lean by comparison. People love to fret about this politician or that politician, but the reality is that Canada got the incentives totally wrong because they sounded nice. No out-of-pocket expenses? No evil private medicine? No profit from healthcare! As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just like it fails everywhere else. So "ensuring everyone has access to reasonably good healthcare" is an excellent goal, but "giving any level of government a monopoly on healthcare insurance" will be the death knell of the generally excellent healthcare Americans have access to if you have insurance.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just like it fails everywhere else Virtually every rich country except America manages to provide “free at point of use” healthcare because of government intervention. And of note, if you’re not happy with what the government provides in most of these countries, you can usually top up to gold-plated health care at a fraction of the cost in the US. Last I checked, the US also managed to do this just fine where it has to: the VHA spends about as much as the NHS does and also gets excellent outcomes. Talking about “the Canadian experience” seems strange to me: don’t each of the provinces/territories do it differently? The Manitobans in my family seem very happy with the provision they get. Regardless, 75% of Canadians are “proud” of Canadian health provision[0]. Most rich countries (that aren’t America) also have essentially instant and free transfers between bank accounts … because either the government intervened or threatened to intervene. 0: https://biv.com/article/2020/08/covid-19-crisis-has-failed-erode-faith-canadian-health-care https://biv.com/article/2020/08/covid-19-crisis-has-failed-e...

Definitely the first and biggest step in the right direction. But it would mostly be, well, catching up on most western countries. However those countries are also complaining about gig workers being taken advantage of.

stetrain 4y ago

Also labor competition in general, and self-employment, and small businesses...

propogandist 4y ago

Make their VCs pay for health care, they subsidize everything else. Most of the companies in this space make no money, and should be shutdown anyway.

Eleison23 4y ago
This will not happen, and the reason is that Obamacare made a great effort to decouple health care insurance and benefits from the employer. Since insurance is now available for purchase on the open marketplace, there are whole classes of employers who don't need to worry about including it in their benefits packages which they offer. It would be a step backwards to require or force companies to include it, especially to gig workers or contract employees; they should simply compensate them enough that they can afford to purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace. If you do not like this structure then you should have worked to block Obamacare from becoming law, because that was a primary objective of the legislation: to decouple health care plans from large companies and employers, and make that insurance more accessible, on the free market, to more workers than ever before.
- propogandist 4y ago
  >they should simply compensate them enough that they can afford to purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace. agreed, but they won't. Most of the "gig" companies are exploitative parasites.
- orangecat 4y ago
  That was one of the good parts of the ACA, although it also inexplicably added employer insurance mandates that created predictable perverse incentives (e.g. employees being limited to less than 30 hours/week). The whole thing is ridiculous: your employer should have no more involvement with your health care or insurance than they do with your food or housing.
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    From outside the US looking in health care being in any way related to employment just seems nuts.
- jwolfe 4y ago
  > Obamacare made a great effort to decouple health care insurance and benefits from the employer Did it? There was lots of talk at the time about how you get to keep your private plan. And the actual text of the ACA mandated that large employers offer health insurance, which was not the case before the ACA. What provisions in the ACA made great efforts to decouple them? i.e., which provisions incentivized individuals to not be on employer plans, or employers not to offer them?
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Actually, the primary objective of the ACA is in the name...Affordable Care. And if that's the metric, it's not achieving its goal. We should also remember that the promise was to lower prices by legally forcing the younger (read: less likely to use services) to sign up. That didn't last long. Editorial: This is why everyone calls it Obamacare. The Reps love the knock. The Dems are not wanting to remind anyone Affordable is in the name. Note: I'm not knocking ACA per se. We should have health care. The issue is ACA is a fine example of: good idea, poor execution. And no one has the will to fix what is by most accounts not living up to its promise or need.
dehrmann 4y ago
Uber, Lyft, and Doordash are public. VCs are just shareholders at this point.

treeman79 4y ago

Everyone can have care like the VA!

dehrmann 4y ago
Realistically, yes. Best case, it looks like Kiaser. They're private, but they're both the insurer and provider, and they compete in the market. Realistically, it looks more like the post office or the DMV.
- shakezula 4y ago
  Having received healthcare services in countries with socialized healthcare, no it doesn’t look like that at all.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Have you ever going through airport customs in Europe and compared it to the US? Sure, other places can do these things well, but the US doesn't have a track record of competent government services.
    - d4mi3n 4y ago
      I hear USPS worked phenomenally well until it became a political target. I think the issue is less that we can’t and more that we won’t support or improve these systems for ideological reasons.
      - abigail95 4y ago
        USPS is a sanctioned monopoly with a USO. It's illegal to compete with it. It's like saying AT&T "worked". Sure you could buy a phone service and pay $$$$ for it, but if I had a better way of running it, they would put me in jail for trying.
        sudosysgen 4y ago

dehrmann 4y ago

There is something weird about government telling business a benefit is so important they have to provide it, but it's apparently not important enough for government to provide it.

junofan 4y ago
Didn’t the government create a marketplace where people can buy health insurance? If people don’t want to use it, why force it?
- stickfigure 4y ago
  Two problems - one is adverse selection, the other is that uninsured people still get care anyway (showing up at the ER) and somebody has to pay for it. Right now we do it by bankrupting every 20th person that walks through the door, which seems rather unfair.
  - a-user-you-like 4y ago
    It used to be, and should be again, that the hospital owner or physician would foot the bill if you couldn’t pay. Much more direct charity, a beautiful thing. Taxing everyone to hell to cover every health expense is immoral.
    - dividefuel 4y ago
      How is it more moral to force someone to provide care for free than it is to tax the populace to provide universal care?
      - a-user-you-like 4y ago
        I wish those advocating universal taxing for crappy care would take the moral high road and not rob his fellow citizen to pay for his bills. Instead, let his fellow citizen give freely in love. Universal healthcare is such a moral sham, and what we have now in the US is also pretty bad. There is a better way.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, it would also shift the balance of power from employers to workers. And even the Dems are hardly pro-labor at this point, to say nothing of all the powers that don't want empowered workers (and will do - and can do - what's necessary to prevent that).

jnwatson 4y ago

It would help startups too.

mc32 4y ago

They could also make it harder to off-shore work and off-shore production to cut costs which in turn would make the lower skilled workforce "more desirable" and needed.

cal5k 4y ago

A lot of Americans seem to not understand what exactly this would entail. Like, the details really matter. Would it be federal, or state-wide? How would it be funded? Would it be public "option", or would private pay be banned like in Canada? How would compensation rates be updated, and how often? Ask any hospital administrator what they think of Medicare/Medicaid rates, and they'll probably answer that they're set too low and that they lose money on Medicare/Medicaid patients. The details on "universal healthcare" can range from heavily-regulated private insurance - Germany for example - to outright bans on private pay for items insured by the government (Canada). A lot of Americans seem to want some sort of federal system that provides insurance for everything, which seems like the best way to get the most expensive, least capable system imaginable. Imagine having yet another insanely expensive, totally underfunded entitlement program that politicians can continuously pad with new promises every 2-4 years when they need to get re-elected. The Canadian experience (source: Canadian currently living in the US) is one you do not want to replicate, so be wary - Canadians have little confidence in their system at this point, even though it's quite expensive relative to European peers - and we have shockingly low numbers of imaging machines, hospital beds, urgent care clinics, etc. per capita, all well having administrative bloat that makes university administration look positively lean by comparison. People love to fret about this politician or that politician, but the reality is that Canada got the incentives totally wrong because they sounded nice. No out-of-pocket expenses? No evil private medicine? No profit from healthcare! As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just like it fails everywhere else. So "ensuring everyone has access to reasonably good healthcare" is an excellent goal, but "giving any level of government a monopoly on healthcare insurance" will be the death knell of the generally excellent healthcare Americans have access to if you have insurance.

petesergeant 4y ago
> As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just like it fails everywhere else Virtually every rich country except America manages to provide “free at point of use” healthcare because of government intervention. And of note, if you’re not happy with what the government provides in most of these countries, you can usually top up to gold-plated health care at a fraction of the cost in the US. Last I checked, the US also managed to do this just fine where it has to: the VHA spends about as much as the NHS does and also gets excellent outcomes. Talking about “the Canadian experience” seems strange to me: don’t each of the provinces/territories do it differently? The Manitobans in my family seem very happy with the provision they get. Regardless, 75% of Canadians are “proud” of Canadian health provision[0]. Most rich countries (that aren’t America) also have essentially instant and free transfers between bank accounts … because either the government intervened or threatened to intervene. 0: https://biv.com/article/2020/08/covid-19-crisis-has-failed-erode-faith-canadian-health-care https://biv.com/article/2020/08/covid-19-crisis-has-failed-e...