2 ms·
While concerns over an interruption in salary are certainly legitimate, just uncoupling health insurance from employment will decrease the barrier to switching
by jsfy 13y ago
While concerns over an interruption in salary are certainly legitimate, just uncoupling health insurance from employment will decrease the barrier to switching jobs and increase mobility.
It's worth noting that the "job lock" that you're referring to is a rather recent phenomenon. Employer-sponsored health insurance was essentially an accident of WWII wage and price controls (source: http://www.nber.org/bah/2009no2/w14839.html http://www.nber.org/bah/2009no2/w14839.html). Because health benefits were exempt from WWII-era wage controls, employers used them to attract employees. Furthermore, because the employer contribution is paid in pre-tax dollars (i.e., employer-sponsored health insurance is effectively subsidized by the government), it became an attractive way to provide greater overall compensation to employees than otherwise possible.
However, the issue of coupling employment to insurance was quickly apparent, which is why we have COBRA (since 1985), but even that is more of a patch than a fix. Regardless of the merits or demerits of Obamacare, uncoupling employment from insurance is (theoretically) a positive outcome for everyone, whether one is an entrepreneur or not. We're already seeing firms shift their cheapest plans to exchanges (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304795804579097422592424860.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230479580457909...). Increasing health insurance portability should make jobs less "sticky" and result in a more efficient distribution of labor.
- einhverfr 13y agoIndeed. BTW, I think Obamacare has largely been an exercise for how to take a broken system and "fix it" if by "fix it" one means stack everything against the individual and for big pharma/medical device manufacturers. The problem is we have used health insurance to chain people to jobs for a long time now, and the result is that it is very hard to be self-employed in the US (much harder than in any other country in the world). This needs to be decoupled whether it is "buy your own insurance," or whether it is something like Canada's province-by-province single payer approach.
- _delirium 13y agoA particularly annoying aspect of employer-tied health insurance is that it's a hassle even when you do have continuous coverage. If you start your next job literally the day after leaving the previous one, you may (unless you get lucky with the providers aligning) no longer be able to go to the doctor you've been going to for years. You'll have to choose a new doctor, in a new location, get records transferred (itself often an adventure), re-fill dozens of pieces of paperwork, re-start prescriptions, etc. It's a huge pile of bureaucracy, and that's among the best cases, where you actually do have continuous coverage. If you were actually in the middle of ongoing treatment at the time of the job change, it's a particularly big hassle to get everything handed off properly.