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Imagine if businesses did not have to worry about their employee's healthcare. Instead they could focus on the business at hand. Maybe this is just a crazy idea

Imagine if businesses did not have to worry about their employee's healthcare. Instead they could focus on the business at hand. Maybe this is just a crazy idea.

duxup 1y ago
What I don't see are businesses advocating for someone to take this work off their hands. I gotta wonder how much hassle this is if it doesn't cause them to advocate for alternatives. Rather lobbying efforts and such seem to focus on other things.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  Businesses should get out of health insurance and also things like 401k. Give the same tax benefits to everybody. I am totally convinced that cost would go down if employees could choose health plans for their own needs instead of the employer choosing what's best for the employer.
  - duxup 1y ago
    I would like them to, but they also don't seem to want out. How much hassle this is to them seems up in the air to me.
JoshGG 1y ago
Crazy! Imagine if human beings did not have to worry about losing access to healthcare for themselves and their children because their company went bankrupt or they got laid off. So Crazy!
- franktankbank 1y ago
  The craziest thing to me is paying less even accounting for insurance for simple seasonal illnesses. Do I have strep? Go to hospital and pay $400 to find out yes/no and then get prescription covered by insurance at opaquely priced pharmacy of your choice. Go to private practice pay $25 and get yes/no and then you can freelance prescription.
crawfordcomeaux 1y ago
Not crazy. Caring about the business without caring about the people who literally are and empower the business is simply dehumanization. It's been done to death. Literally. Edit: People seem to think I'm proposing businesses keep operating how they are. I'm suggesting businesses that truly care need people running them who know how to care, not the normalized psychopathy that's become corporate culture. I'm not suggesting current or past harmful relationships with businesses continue or that even those businesses should continue.
- ambicapter 1y ago
  Should business also care about their employee's diets and fitness regimes? There are things that are outside of the purview of a business and the healthcare of their employees, outside of the direct impact of the business's work environment on the employee's health, should not be part of it. Another way to say it, there is more to health than how an employer affects a person's life, and those things are none of the business' business.
  - crawfordcomeaux 1y ago
    Yes, businesses would be better off if they cared about wellbeing to such a degree. That doesn't mean control employees, though. It means to actually care about the quality of food the employees have access to and the quality of culture surrounding them. It means caring about the environments people live in. It means recognizing people LEARN to make harming choices through harm (individual, familial, social, collective, cultural, systemic...etc) so recognizing repair is needed & pursuing that. This is what lobbying would be about without dehumanization. Don't get lost in the fascist fantasies of what it means to care.
    - throwway120385 1y ago
      I don't want my employer to be involved in any of that though. Otherwise we'll be having a lot more conversations with people who are completely unqualified to make any determinations about things like my mental health.
mcs5280 1y ago
This is how they keep the cogs trapped in the machine
- jerlam 1y ago
  Tying health insurance (via tax benefits) to employment was a explicit decision by the US government to make people work, but it also makes people stay in worse jobs longer out of fear.
  - crawfordcomeaux 1y ago
    Don't pretend what the US does amounts to genuine care. The philosophy behind a business caring for employees and implementations of slavery are two fundamentally different topics, only confused when buying into US propaganda.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    Sure. 80 years ago, in the context of the war economy of WW2 How is that relevant? Democrats have been pushing for Medicare for all or some other fully socialized system since the Kennedys, while republicans have shown zero ability to do anything but ban you from buying cheaper drugs Pretending this is "gubermint bad" is just ignorant. It also just, wasn't the government's explicit doing. The government froze wages during a literally existential war. Look at Russia right now for why that's generally a good idea. Companies responded by offering non-wage payments of various sorts. The US built a significant fraction of ALL war material for the allies in WW2. They did this through significant amounts of command economy. Building a Liberty transport ship every other day was done by centralized planning, NOT the free market. See the US's current difficulties buying 155mm howitzer rounds for examples of how the "free market" is worthless at dealing with real wartime production concerns. We didn't build 50k tanks by waiting for the free market to collect a payday. We didn't build more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world combined by relying on the free market. So why haven't republicans fixed this in the near 70 years of political dominance they've had in the US? Democrats have consistently pushed for solving this shitty situation for decades, but have never gotten the votes needed to even get into government.
barbazoo 1y ago
Someone has to pay for healthcare. If not the employer directly, then they’ll pay for it through higher wages. Are you suggesting employees stop paying for healthcare altogether?
- kingnothing 1y ago
  The US pays more per capita for healthcare than any developed nation. We should redirect those funds to more taxes to pay for Medicare for all. Costs will go down and your healthcare will no longer be tied to your employment. As a bonus, everyone gets healthcare.
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    Sure but that’s not gonna happen. Workers mostly ever only get things taken away these days. It wouldn’t mean that money is available somewhere else all of a sudden to pay for healthcare.
    - kingnothing 1y ago
      If Congress could decide to agree on something, they announce taxes are being raised by X% to provide Medicare for all next year. Next year, employers stop providing healthcare via insurance companies and everyone signs up for medicare. Done.
      - coredog64 1y ago
        One of the huge fights about ACA from the left was so-called "Cadillac Plans": Unions negotiated excellent medical insurance coverage in lieu of wages for their members. If you suddenly axed employer-provided coverage, nearly every union in the US would want to renegotiate contracts to account for that.
  - andrei_says_ 1y ago
    But what about billions in profit for healthcare insurance companies and their business model to collect money and deny benefits?
polygotdomain 1y ago
I completely agree. While it's counter intuitive, many businesses want to maintain control of employee's healthcare. Some companies look at it as a way to compete by offering better benefits than their competitors. A lot of companies like controlling healthcare because it keeps employees tied to their employer. If you temporarily lose your insurance when you switch a job, all of the sudden switching doesn't look as good. When you get to really larger companies, then they have the ability to self-insure, which means they can control the costs a hell of a lot more. Of course, since many companies prefer less regulation, the last thing they'd want to do is hand over the keys to what they do for the healthcare for their employees over to the government. With things how they are now, they can always cut or pair back their plans if they want to cut costs. That lever would be gone with single payer. Like many things, the system is set up to benefit those in charge rather than those who it's meant to serve. You can look just about anywhere outside the US and see that universal healthcare is a much better system, but better for who? Not much of a benefit for those who make the decisions, so we keep the flawed system we have.
- TuringNYC 1y ago
  >> Some companies look at it as a way to compete by offering better benefits than their competitors. Do they really? I've see only select hedge funds actually advertise their health plans. Even that is usually that "we pay 100% of premiums." Most plans are impossible to assess until you actually get to the job and see the tiers available and support available. The devil is in the details -- network coverage for your specific state, co-insurance, co-pays, deductibles, % premium paid, support like QoS/tier.
  - polygotdomain 1y ago
    Competition based on benefits really comes in at the low end and the top end of employment. If you're a tradesperson, just having insurance coverage is a big thing. It doesn't matter if it's not great, it's better than nothing. Leaving a job with insurance for one without insurance is likely going to cost you thousands of dollars out of pocket for the same coverage. At the top end, companies will have plans that cover so many things at very high percentages, meaning that your out of pocket for health insurance will be surprisingly small. Less competitive companies simply can't offer that. It's only in the middle where the details of a plan matter, and those are going to be the hardest details to find.
bko 1y ago
If you think health insurance is expensive now, wait until it's free! In all seriousness, if a private business with all the incentive in the world can't figure out how to lower healthcare costs, I don't see how punting to the government would somehow be better. Everyone that proposes a single payer can't explain who makes less money. Will we save money by the doctors getting paid less? The drug companies? Where do these savings come from? Even if you're able to do everything the health insurance company does and capture 100% of their margin with equal efficiency, you'll capture a profit margin of around 2-6%. The only argument I hear is "other countries do it", which is just unpersuasive. It's not a serious argument. Propose something better
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  "The only argument I hear is "other countries do it", which is just unpersuasive. It's not a serious argument. Propose something better" What's unserious about this?
- kingnothing 1y ago
  Single payer is cheaper. The US spends more per capita than any other developed nation and is not even capable of providing health care to all of its citizens. Move to single payer, kill the medical insurance industry, and save these costs: The health insurance industry employs approximately 605,000-912,000 people directly. The top 10 companies generate over $1.5 trillion in combined revenue annually. Conservative estimates suggest these companies spend $45-90 billion annually on employee salaries.
  - bko 1y ago
    > The US spends more per capita than any other developed nation and is not even capable of providing health care to all of its citizens. US has medicare and medicaid. It actually spends more than most other countries. I guess they need to spend more to save money? Again throwing around stats about health insurance industry is not an argument. That money gets spent on something unless you think there is some grand cabal of health insurance companies to do make-work and hire people and set money on fire for no reason. Why doesn't some greedy capitalist start a health insurance company, set slightly less money on fire and provide great healthcare? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-spends-public-money-healthcare-sweden-canada/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-spends-public-money-hea...
turtlebits 1y ago
They don't have to, it's a perk I'm sure that many (me included) rather have their employer pay/take care of, than to do it out of pocket with higher salary.
- forgotoldacc 1y ago
  American mindset. In some countries it's just provided to everyone equally. And no, we don't have the wait times Americans are afraid of. I can visit a doctor the same day and get treatment. My friends back in the US are desperately trying to find appointments with everything filled months down the line. America has the worst of all systems combined.
  - turtlebits 1y ago
    Solve that problem first and maybe I'll change my mind. Otherwise I'm being honest in my situation. IME employer provided insurance is way better than what I can find on my own.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      That's because health insurance in the US sucks major ass. It's just bad, period. More expensive for comparatively much worse care and worse outcomes on Average. Americans (I'm an American) sometimes have a preconceived notion that, if something is really expensive, it must be good. No... no that's not necessarily the case. The insurance companies would love for you to believe that, but in actuality, we're just getting fucked. It's just a worse system overall, in pretty much every metric you could possibly choose.
mothballed 1y ago
Everyone needs healthcare, and offering the benefit is mostly untaxed, so it's just a way of offering a higher compensation than the competition that doesn't. End result is most every professional full time job offers it, because taxed can't compete with untaxed.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  You've explained the current situation without acknowledging any of its downsides, good job.
latchkey 1y ago
I don't worry about it. I just pay it 100% for my employees.

Imagine if businesses did not have to worry about their employee's healthcare. Instead they could focus on the business at hand. Maybe this is just a crazy idea.

duxup 1y ago

What I don't see are businesses advocating for someone to take this work off their hands. I gotta wonder how much hassle this is if it doesn't cause them to advocate for alternatives. Rather lobbying efforts and such seem to focus on other things.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
Businesses should get out of health insurance and also things like 401k. Give the same tax benefits to everybody. I am totally convinced that cost would go down if employees could choose health plans for their own needs instead of the employer choosing what's best for the employer.
- duxup 1y ago
  I would like them to, but they also don't seem to want out. How much hassle this is to them seems up in the air to me.

JoshGG 1y ago

Crazy! Imagine if human beings did not have to worry about losing access to healthcare for themselves and their children because their company went bankrupt or they got laid off. So Crazy!

franktankbank 1y ago
The craziest thing to me is paying less even accounting for insurance for simple seasonal illnesses. Do I have strep? Go to hospital and pay $400 to find out yes/no and then get prescription covered by insurance at opaquely priced pharmacy of your choice. Go to private practice pay $25 and get yes/no and then you can freelance prescription.

crawfordcomeaux 1y ago

Not crazy. Caring about the business without caring about the people who literally are and empower the business is simply dehumanization. It's been done to death. Literally. Edit: People seem to think I'm proposing businesses keep operating how they are. I'm suggesting businesses that truly care need people running them who know how to care, not the normalized psychopathy that's become corporate culture. I'm not suggesting current or past harmful relationships with businesses continue or that even those businesses should continue.

ambicapter 1y ago
Should business also care about their employee's diets and fitness regimes? There are things that are outside of the purview of a business and the healthcare of their employees, outside of the direct impact of the business's work environment on the employee's health, should not be part of it. Another way to say it, there is more to health than how an employer affects a person's life, and those things are none of the business' business.
- crawfordcomeaux 1y ago
  Yes, businesses would be better off if they cared about wellbeing to such a degree. That doesn't mean control employees, though. It means to actually care about the quality of food the employees have access to and the quality of culture surrounding them. It means caring about the environments people live in. It means recognizing people LEARN to make harming choices through harm (individual, familial, social, collective, cultural, systemic...etc) so recognizing repair is needed & pursuing that. This is what lobbying would be about without dehumanization. Don't get lost in the fascist fantasies of what it means to care.
  - throwway120385 1y ago
    I don't want my employer to be involved in any of that though. Otherwise we'll be having a lot more conversations with people who are completely unqualified to make any determinations about things like my mental health.

mcs5280 1y ago

This is how they keep the cogs trapped in the machine

jerlam 1y ago
Tying health insurance (via tax benefits) to employment was a explicit decision by the US government to make people work, but it also makes people stay in worse jobs longer out of fear.
- crawfordcomeaux 1y ago
  Don't pretend what the US does amounts to genuine care. The philosophy behind a business caring for employees and implementations of slavery are two fundamentally different topics, only confused when buying into US propaganda.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  Sure. 80 years ago, in the context of the war economy of WW2 How is that relevant? Democrats have been pushing for Medicare for all or some other fully socialized system since the Kennedys, while republicans have shown zero ability to do anything but ban you from buying cheaper drugs Pretending this is "gubermint bad" is just ignorant. It also just, wasn't the government's explicit doing. The government froze wages during a literally existential war. Look at Russia right now for why that's generally a good idea. Companies responded by offering non-wage payments of various sorts. The US built a significant fraction of ALL war material for the allies in WW2. They did this through significant amounts of command economy. Building a Liberty transport ship every other day was done by centralized planning, NOT the free market. See the US's current difficulties buying 155mm howitzer rounds for examples of how the "free market" is worthless at dealing with real wartime production concerns. We didn't build 50k tanks by waiting for the free market to collect a payday. We didn't build more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world combined by relying on the free market. So why haven't republicans fixed this in the near 70 years of political dominance they've had in the US? Democrats have consistently pushed for solving this shitty situation for decades, but have never gotten the votes needed to even get into government.

barbazoo 1y ago

Someone has to pay for healthcare. If not the employer directly, then they’ll pay for it through higher wages. Are you suggesting employees stop paying for healthcare altogether?

kingnothing 1y ago
The US pays more per capita for healthcare than any developed nation. We should redirect those funds to more taxes to pay for Medicare for all. Costs will go down and your healthcare will no longer be tied to your employment. As a bonus, everyone gets healthcare.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Sure but that’s not gonna happen. Workers mostly ever only get things taken away these days. It wouldn’t mean that money is available somewhere else all of a sudden to pay for healthcare.
  - kingnothing 1y ago
    If Congress could decide to agree on something, they announce taxes are being raised by X% to provide Medicare for all next year. Next year, employers stop providing healthcare via insurance companies and everyone signs up for medicare. Done.
    - coredog64 1y ago
      One of the huge fights about ACA from the left was so-called "Cadillac Plans": Unions negotiated excellent medical insurance coverage in lieu of wages for their members. If you suddenly axed employer-provided coverage, nearly every union in the US would want to renegotiate contracts to account for that.
- andrei_says_ 1y ago
  But what about billions in profit for healthcare insurance companies and their business model to collect money and deny benefits?

polygotdomain 1y ago

I completely agree. While it's counter intuitive, many businesses want to maintain control of employee's healthcare. Some companies look at it as a way to compete by offering better benefits than their competitors. A lot of companies like controlling healthcare because it keeps employees tied to their employer. If you temporarily lose your insurance when you switch a job, all of the sudden switching doesn't look as good. When you get to really larger companies, then they have the ability to self-insure, which means they can control the costs a hell of a lot more. Of course, since many companies prefer less regulation, the last thing they'd want to do is hand over the keys to what they do for the healthcare for their employees over to the government. With things how they are now, they can always cut or pair back their plans if they want to cut costs. That lever would be gone with single payer. Like many things, the system is set up to benefit those in charge rather than those who it's meant to serve. You can look just about anywhere outside the US and see that universal healthcare is a much better system, but better for who? Not much of a benefit for those who make the decisions, so we keep the flawed system we have.

TuringNYC 1y ago
>> Some companies look at it as a way to compete by offering better benefits than their competitors. Do they really? I've see only select hedge funds actually advertise their health plans. Even that is usually that "we pay 100% of premiums." Most plans are impossible to assess until you actually get to the job and see the tiers available and support available. The devil is in the details -- network coverage for your specific state, co-insurance, co-pays, deductibles, % premium paid, support like QoS/tier.
- polygotdomain 1y ago
  Competition based on benefits really comes in at the low end and the top end of employment. If you're a tradesperson, just having insurance coverage is a big thing. It doesn't matter if it's not great, it's better than nothing. Leaving a job with insurance for one without insurance is likely going to cost you thousands of dollars out of pocket for the same coverage. At the top end, companies will have plans that cover so many things at very high percentages, meaning that your out of pocket for health insurance will be surprisingly small. Less competitive companies simply can't offer that. It's only in the middle where the details of a plan matter, and those are going to be the hardest details to find.

bko 1y ago

If you think health insurance is expensive now, wait until it's free! In all seriousness, if a private business with all the incentive in the world can't figure out how to lower healthcare costs, I don't see how punting to the government would somehow be better. Everyone that proposes a single payer can't explain who makes less money. Will we save money by the doctors getting paid less? The drug companies? Where do these savings come from? Even if you're able to do everything the health insurance company does and capture 100% of their margin with equal efficiency, you'll capture a profit margin of around 2-6%. The only argument I hear is "other countries do it", which is just unpersuasive. It's not a serious argument. Propose something better

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
"The only argument I hear is "other countries do it", which is just unpersuasive. It's not a serious argument. Propose something better" What's unserious about this?
kingnothing 1y ago
Single payer is cheaper. The US spends more per capita than any other developed nation and is not even capable of providing health care to all of its citizens. Move to single payer, kill the medical insurance industry, and save these costs: The health insurance industry employs approximately 605,000-912,000 people directly. The top 10 companies generate over $1.5 trillion in combined revenue annually. Conservative estimates suggest these companies spend $45-90 billion annually on employee salaries.
- bko 1y ago
  > The US spends more per capita than any other developed nation and is not even capable of providing health care to all of its citizens. US has medicare and medicaid. It actually spends more than most other countries. I guess they need to spend more to save money? Again throwing around stats about health insurance industry is not an argument. That money gets spent on something unless you think there is some grand cabal of health insurance companies to do make-work and hire people and set money on fire for no reason. Why doesn't some greedy capitalist start a health insurance company, set slightly less money on fire and provide great healthcare? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-spends-public-money-healthcare-sweden-canada/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-spends-public-money-hea...

turtlebits 1y ago

They don't have to, it's a perk I'm sure that many (me included) rather have their employer pay/take care of, than to do it out of pocket with higher salary.

forgotoldacc 1y ago
American mindset. In some countries it's just provided to everyone equally. And no, we don't have the wait times Americans are afraid of. I can visit a doctor the same day and get treatment. My friends back in the US are desperately trying to find appointments with everything filled months down the line. America has the worst of all systems combined.
- turtlebits 1y ago
  Solve that problem first and maybe I'll change my mind. Otherwise I'm being honest in my situation. IME employer provided insurance is way better than what I can find on my own.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    That's because health insurance in the US sucks major ass. It's just bad, period. More expensive for comparatively much worse care and worse outcomes on Average. Americans (I'm an American) sometimes have a preconceived notion that, if something is really expensive, it must be good. No... no that's not necessarily the case. The insurance companies would love for you to believe that, but in actuality, we're just getting fucked. It's just a worse system overall, in pretty much every metric you could possibly choose.

mothballed 1y ago

Everyone needs healthcare, and offering the benefit is mostly untaxed, so it's just a way of offering a higher compensation than the competition that doesn't. End result is most every professional full time job offers it, because taxed can't compete with untaxed.

franktankbank 1y ago
You've explained the current situation without acknowledging any of its downsides, good job.

latchkey 1y ago

I don't worry about it. I just pay it 100% for my employees.