Decoupling health insurance and retirement investment plans from one's employer reduces friction for individuals selling their labor to switch jobs without worr

Decoupling health insurance and retirement investment plans from one's employer reduces friction for individuals selling their labor to switch jobs without worrying that it is going to blow up some other facet of their lives. How it works here in Australia: there's a public health system (~15% of federal government budget). Individuals or families can also purchase varying degrees of private health cover, if they so wish. Health insurance isn't coupled to employment. There's no standard or expectation that employers directly provide health cover to employees as part of the deal of being an employee. Similarly, choices for how to invest for retirement are decoupled from employment. 11% of gross wages must be paid into a "superannuation" fund, a special kind of tax-advantaged investment fund. The employee has the choice of which superannuation fund they want to use, and can elect to switch between funds. There is a marketplace of private health insurers and superannuation (retirement investment) funds. Both the private health insurance sector and the superannuation sector are regulated, which reduces the potential for the degree of criminality and grift. Competition is essential, but regulation is also essential and in the public benefit. Large companies may choose to set up and offer their own proprietary superannuation funds to their employees, but employees have the freedom to ignore this and choose a different externally managed fund. E.g. LiarsGriftersThievesMountebanks LLC might offer their employees the option of directing their superannuation contributions to the proprietary LGTM retirement fund, which invests employees funds in bonded whisky barrel scams run by parties related to the directors, and charges 2% p.a. management fees, but employees have the freedom to ignore this deal and use some other super fund. There are giant "industry funds" that historically were set up by trade unions & only open to people working in a specific industry -- they're often operating at a large enough scale to provide good investment returns, have low fees, and are operated as not-for-profits.