> "if you forced companies to pay through their leave, that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon" Thi

> "if you forced companies to pay through their leave, that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon" This is already done, though it is never admitted for obvious reasons. A portion of the gender pay gap, especially in tech, is due to employer perception that hiring women who might have children is risky. Federal law already allows employers to charge their employees higher health insurance rates if they are smokers [1]. And why not? Employers have an incentive to do this because they are required by law to provide health insurance to their full time workers (if they have > 50 employees, anyway). If you are paying for a significant portion of someone's healthcare, and they are making voluntary choices which will cost you more money, any kind of working market will lead to increased healthcare costs in such a situation. Childcare, as you mentioned, is usually a voluntary decision. Maybe, as a society, we decide that we want to subsidize procreation as is done in many European countries and have the government foot the bill for parental leave, but if we decide to leave it up to employers (who don't care if you have kids or not) we shouldn't be surprised if parental leave is lacking. The entire U.S. health and insurance system (I certainly wouldn't call it a "market") is rotten to the core. The bulk of the costs are typically paid by employers, so employers--whose incentives most definitely do not serve their employees' health--get to set the policies under which an individual's healthcare may be provided. It's absurd. The only two sensible systems are a completely individualized system with no employers as middlemen, or a completely socialized one where the government accepts ultimate responsibility (and therefore control) for the health of the people. What we have is a monstrous catastrophe that would have already bankrupted other nations. [1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-make-health-insurance-too-expensive-smokers http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-...