17 ms·

One thing that upsets me when such topics arise is the non-mention of how Health Insurance plays a huge part in all this. This might be something that UK/EU fo

• benmccann 14y ago
  You can continue your employer-provided healthcare for 18 months via COBRA.
  • rpwilcox 14y ago
    and pay out the nose for it, from what I've heard...
    • joezydeco 14y ago
      Absolutely. Go ask your HR rep what your plan actually costs per month. For my small company, the family plan is nearly $3,000/mo.
      • mattgreenrocks 14y ago
        As a healthy 30 year old, I'm paying 500/mo for a PPO on COBRA.
  • _delirium 14y ago
    That's still a bit risky if you have a major health problem. I have a friend with a congenital heart defect, and he treats the 18 months of COBRA as the absolute last-ditch fallback to use only if he ever gets laid off: it gives him a hard deadline of 18 months to find another job with a group health plan. But he wouldn't voluntarily put himself in that position where he has to find a new job w/ good benefits in 18 months, so he would never really quit a job unless he had another one lined up ahead of time (and doing a startup or consulting is out of the question, because the individual health insurance would cost a ton). Pretty weird/absurd tie-in between professional life and the genetic lottery imo, due to the strange way health risk pools and employment pools have gotten conflated in post-WW2 America. Anyone can be an entrepreneur, as long as you didn't get unlucky in the womb!
• specialist 14y ago
  I've taken and stayed at crap jobs precisely for the health insurance. When I was consulting, I was self-insured thru my state's insurance of last resort. Expensive, while it was available. The cost of health insurance is an active deterrent to me risking my own startups. Hypocrisy and contradictions from the free market zealots is nothing new. And yet I remain stunned that the same freaks who say they want a flexible work force, ya know, that whole "free market" thang, actively oppose the single biggest enabler to a mobile work force, universal health insurance.
  • paulhauggis 14y ago
    "And yet I remain stunned that the same freaks who say they want a flexible work force, ya know, that whole "free market" thang, actively oppose the single biggest enabler to a mobile work force, universal health insurance." I'm stunned that people that hate monopolies seem to be fine with a government-run one. In all cases, innovation stops and quality declines because nobody really has a choice. When you can assure me this won't happen, I might start supporting universal health care. I can barely trust the bloated and inefficient government to run un-important things..I sure as hell can't trust them to run something as important as health care.
    • _delirium 14y ago
      I don't have a lot of data points, but I've lived in both the U.S. (non-public healthcare) and Denmark (public healthcare) and the quality and convenience of the latter is quite good in comparison, imo. The amount of sheer bureaucracy is much lower in Denmark as well; I don't have to file reimbursement forms for a half-dozen different doctors, worry about copay rules or what precisely constitutes a "preexisting condition", or spend time on the phone with insurance agents to figure out why a bill was rejected. It just works: you go to the doctor, you never receive a bill, the end. Outcomes seem on par or better than in the U.S. as well. However I would be open to a voucher-type system where the actual providers are private, competing for customers who pay into a common risk pool. It's the tying of the risk pool to employers that's most problematic to me, and which imo severely weakens other parts of the free market, by reducing labor mobility. That might actually improve some free-market elements of healthcare, since the actual customers would choose providers, rather than their employers doing it for them.
• tomjen3 14y ago
  The entire thing is a problem because you can pay for your insurance, but only through your company right? Why the fuck doesn't congress fix that then?
  • excuse-me 14y ago
    Because then employees would have the freedom to leave one employer for another to get better money/conditions/etc This would cost employers money. who do you think pays for congressmen?
  • roc 14y ago
    Congress won't touch employer-provided health care, because providing health care to employees is a popular corporate tax break. As to third party insurance: Yes, technically you can buy third-party insurance. But, no, it really isn't a remotely functional market. In short, if you don't really need the insurance, you can probably get reasonable coverage. But if you actually need it, it will be too late and nothing will be remotely affordable and/or cover much.
    • twoodfin 14y ago
      If you only buy it when you need it, it's not "insurance".
      • roc 14y ago
        I was referring to things like: when your COBRA runs out. Or when you switch to a job that doesn't offer insurance, but are no longer a 20-something with no real medical history, or when you have children, etc. Not "the day after you break your leg". Though there's a lot to be said about not being able to get insurance to defray costs of a 'pre-existing' condition. Sure, it's unworkable to allow people to buy insurance 5 minutes after they break their leg and then cancel it 5 minutes after it's set in a cast and their prescriptions are filled. But there's no reason a contract couldn't be drafted, obligating someone to pay for a particular insurance plan for X months, complete with early termination fees and such. Verizon and Comcast figured this out. Is it really too much for Aetna?
• stephengillie 14y ago
  What still mystifies me is how large grocery stores, like Safeway, Albertson's, Kroger, etc can afford to pay 100% medical care for their employees. I was a Safeway employee (and begrudging UFCW member) from 1998-2007, and received 100% paid for medical, dental, vision, and other care merely for working more than 20 hours a month. For family care, employees merely must work more than 30 hours a month. 6 years ago, Safeway's CEO announced they would be requiring preventative care and physicals to cut medical costs: http://www.yalemedlaw.com/2008/11/the-safeway-effect/ http://www.yalemedlaw.com/2008/11/the-safeway-effect/ After completing college, I've found that the 4 companies I've worked for (mid-level IT for fortune 50 financial/tech companies) claimed they couldn't afford to pay for any medical care. Instead, they reminded us how much compensation they were already providing. Why are grocery stores able to pay for this when nobody else will?
  • rmah 14y ago
    One word: unions. When all grocery stores are unionized and must pay for this benefit, the costs are simply passed on to consumers.
    • jaredmck 14y ago
      And each union local (in this case, UFCW) has collective bargaining every couple years to set the rates at which health care contributions must be made on behalf of each employee. (former actuarial consultant, worked on union health funds)
  • drewrv 14y ago
    They're unionized, that's why they do it.
  • carguy1983 14y ago
    Grocery stores aren't very profitable.
    • stephengillie 14y ago
      And yet they can somehow pay for 100% medical care when nobody else can?
• antidoh 14y ago
  "healthcare costs companies alot of money, and it may be something that a large percentage of them would like to avoid" They are reducing it, by putting a larger share of the cost on to the employee. The key here is not that health insurance becomes affordable via an employer, it's that it becomes at all possible via an employer for many employees. Recognizing that, it just becomes an exercise in how large a share of the cost employers can shift to their employees, factoring in their ratio of young/healthy/mobile workers to old/needy/trapped workers.
• bitops 14y ago
  > This might be something that UK/EU folks might not be able to empathise with You are absolutely correct. As long as the US is unwilling to socialize its health care, there is very little sympathy for people putting up with soul-sucking jobs because they are against some half-baked notion of "socialism". (And I would argue that many Americans do not know what socialism is - they often conflate it with communism, which is entirely different).
  • kian 14y ago
    > As long as the US is unwilling to socialize its health care, there is very little sympathy for people putting up with soul-sucking jobs because they are against some half-baked notion of "socialism". Things aren't so simple as just 'socializing health care'. For a country in which the majority of medical spending is state subsidy, it's hard not to think we already have. And while I might personally be a closer fit to your unsympathetic libertarian strawman, I recognize that I'm a tiny minority in the American population at large. It seems rather harsh to deride a population of people for having to put up with a regulatory environment that clearly isn't of their choosing.
    • bitops 14y ago
      >It seems rather harsh to deride a population of people for having to put up with a regulatory environment that clearly isn't of their choosing. I used to believe this also but changed my mind after the 2004 elections in the US. We are living in an environment that clearly is of our choosing - we either voted for it or didn't care enough to vote against. While it's true that some people don't like how the current system works, very few people in America seem to believe that it would be worthwhile throwing everyone out of office or demanding real discourse in politics. It's true that the world is dominated by sound-bytes, etc. but there's a reason that stuff keeps showing up on TV and other media - it sells. When people value thinking about the world they live and realize that good solutions usually are not "partisan" things might change for the better. But that seems unlikely.