Started back in WW2 when the government restricted the ability for employers to offer higher salaries, so employers offered additional compensation to employees outside of salary. That coupled with today's tax incentives have made it stick.
I know that history. But it’s time to change something that made sense a long time ago but now is distorting the whole employment market, costs a lot of money and causes a lot of suffering.
Or Venezuela. As part of consolidating power, often authoritarian governments implement an arms buyback or confiscation program to minimize armed uprising later on.
I like the Orwellian term “buy back” as if you purchased arms from them in the first place, and secondly they’re using your money to deprive you. For the small arms nay sayers (against a well equipped military) case in point is Afghanistan, guerrillas wore down the Soviets.
It certainly did in 1765. Do you really think the government should have a monopoly on force? Might = power, you disarm the population and they are rendered powerless. I just don't understand putting that much trust in the government
Historical and logistical context aside, 1765 vs modern weaponry and war waging abilities, are you joking? The ability for militias with small arms to fight our own military has been a joke for several decades.
Can you explain to me then why Vietnam is a communist country? As I recall, they were able to cause quite a lot of trouble for the US military and its modern weaponry and war waging abilities with pretty much nothing but small arms.
>modern weaponry and war waging abilities, are you joking?
The Taliban aren't joking.
You are grossly under-estimating what it takes to fight an insurgency. A military fighting in the same country on which it depends is vulnerable to attacks and sabotage on all its support infrastructure. You can't just carpet bomb areas of resistance because that creates more resistance elsewhere or destroy the country you're trying to control. It's a hard problem and on some level you have to get people on "your side" to win in any sort of long term sense.
Amazed this was downvoted. The willingness to ignore history because it doesn’t fit in with some folks’ perception of the world is fully on display here.
Absolutely, it's a highly effective tactic that has resulted in success across continents and centuries. It's nice that peace is so taken for granted in developed countries, but it is an outlier in the human experience.
And to the commenter who said modern militaries could never be stopped by small militias, you have only to look seriously at our adventures in Afghanistan and the fact that we're still there. The AK 47 is a less accurate, high-recoil stamped out piece of garbage compared to the AR 15, and it's all you need to stop a modern military in its tracks for decades.
Weapons, including small arms, are best viewed as a deterrence.
Evidence 1: Many videos of rabidly anti-gun folks who refuse to put a "This home is proudly gun free" sign in their front yard.
Evidence 2: The US has thought twice (definitely still not enough) before invading other countries after Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Small and improvised arms have been a real headache.
Evidence 3: Hong Kong. Someone asked below if the situation in Hong Kong would be better if there were lots of guns available. That's not really a relevant question. The situation would be entirely different. The government would have been much more limited in its response.
Evidence 4: Historically one of the first things a want-to-be totalitarian government does is confiscate weapons held by the populace.
All it does is raise the stakes. Thats why police forces in America are heavily militarised. I can guarantee that if Hong Kong citizens had guns the police would have a disproportionate answer that included more deadly weaponry than they already do.
> Thats why police forces in America are heavily militarised.
Police forces are heavily militarized because of the bonkers amount of money thrown at them in the name of the "War on Drugs" and more recent "War on Terror". Note the connection between "war" and an increasingly militarized police force.
How do you reconcile the amount of deaths by firearms and the rise of mass shootings? Talking historically and hypothetical's about where guns come in handy is really simple. It get's really difficult when you wake up to news of another mass shooting - sometimes it is the second or third one to occur that month (or week).
Admittedly that is a problem. Interestingly, it's a relatively recent one. Believe it or not there was a time in US history when you could mail-order full auto weapons.
Homicide is on a secular downward trend (despite the ever-increasing proliferation of firearms in the US). Mass shootings, while tragic, are black swan events and it does not make sense to dismantle a political foundation with long-term benefits to deter a marginal crime that could be done with a van.
A better response to mass shootings would be to desensationalize the media coverage, which since Columbine has been indulging the shooters' motives to shock society.
Incidentally though this whole thread is grossly off-topic and I expect it will be collapsed or detached.
The “rise of mass shootings” is mostly a media phenomenon. They are still extremely rare events.
Gun laws haven’t gotten laxer in the last couple decades either - many states have strengthened them. There isn’t a clear connection between weak gun laws and mass shootings.
(That said, a total and effective ban on guns would of course stop mass shootings and other gun violence - if it could be implemented successfully)
First you would have to remove weapons from law-abiding citizens and criminals. The first one might be easier (with occasional resistance). The second might be much harder since criminals don't really care about laws in the first place.
>a total and effective ban on guns would of course stop mass shootings and other gun violence
But then, the cherrypicked, tautological nature of this goal is elided by gun control advocates--reducing gun violence without addressing the root social causes of violence is just a shell game.
Armed militia will not win the fight in raw power terms, but it changes the governments position completely.
Unarmed riot can be dispersed using tear gas etc, no need to kill the civilians. Armed riot requires actually killing the opposition.
While government will almost certainly succeed in killing the militia the international opinion is wholly different in that case. 10000 person protesters dispersed vs 10000 killed.
Anyone who believes that the US Government is committing terrible acts, but also wants them to take away firearms is in a really indefensible rational position.
Do you think successful armed rebellion with small arms is realistic these days? How well did that work out for the people at Waco or the Cliven Bundy standoff?
It worked great for Bundy, I doubt the government would have backed down without the threat of violence. It works great in Afghanistan, and it worked great in Vietnam. It didn't work out great in Waco.
Which part of the electoral college do you have a problem with? I'm a fan of the fact that it gives smaller states a voice, but don't like the fact that it's winner-take-all in every state except Maine. Also faithless electors is complete bullshit that needs to go.
That is called the senate. There is no reason that a person in Wyoming's vote is worth four times as much as a person in California.
You can sorta maybe make the argument that the elctoral college should be to make sure someone unfit shouldn't be put in, by using their sense of judgement. Well that obviously failed, and you are advocating getting rid of that potential benefit.
Why not get rid of the entire anti-democratic idea and just vote for the president.
In a direct democracy the President could be chosen by a handful of highly populated states. There would be no reason for Wyoming to continue participating in the Union without a meaningful stake in representation. The direct vote concept sees this country as homogeneous, and it's too large and diverse for that.
The meaningful stake in representation is their two Senate seats, the exact same number that states large enough to be world powers if they were their own countries get.
Remember, this body of representatives was the one that managed to stall Obama's Supreme Court nominee until a new President was elected. That is a lot of power.
There will never be a President that everyone wants. The way to make the most people happy is to put into power the one that the most people voted for.
How many campaign stops are in Wyoming? How often do Republican presidential candidates campaign in California? How often do Democratic presidential candidates campaign in Alabama? The Electoral College doesn't actually address any of the issues raised in its defense.
Part of the issue is that there is a fixed number of house seats, which disproportionately favours smaller states. If we had an unbounded number of house seats and instead fixed the max constitutes-per-representative, the house would have a different makeup.
The senate gives equal representation to each state.
The electoral college gives each state a degree of representation approximately proportional to its population, but the approximation is somewhat poor.
Yes, they are different things.
Yes, the Senate gives states equal representation.
However, the Senate isn't "like" the Electoral College. The Senate is what makes Congress like the EC...or vice versa.
So if you believe the US isn't a collection of united states, which is why the senate exists and why the EC exists, then it is only rational to argue against both intuitions.
You could believe that the Senate is a fine implementation of it's goals (to protect inhabitants of smaller states from the tyranny of the majority, or whatever) while also believing that the electoral college is a failure that just adds noise to the popular vote.
The EC "adds noise the the popular vote" in the same way the senate adds noise to the legislative will of the population.
In one hand you say it's a bad thing, on the other its OK. It's not logical and the only way I can explain it is being sore losers of the last election.
I keep hearing how Trump is going to destroy our Constitution, but I also keep hearing from leftist how we need to change the first amendment, the second amendment, and the EC.
Why are for profit prisons any different than state owned prisons? The guard unions and other employees that are contracted out to work in the state owned ones are making just as much money and rely on that slavery in the same way as they do in for profit ones. I see no difference, demolish them all.
Because state owned prisons do not sign contracts with the state requiring % full or penalties. Only private prisons sign contracts with governments requiring 90%+ capacity or penalties. Thus only private prisons truly incentivize local governments to incarcerate more people to avoid extra costs, while if that facility is run by the taxpayer, they enjoy the savings of hiring less guards and incarcerating less people.
Same reason s private corporate run police force or fire department are a bad idea.
With all the flaws current system have, governments are at least accountable (on paper) to the citizens. Corporations are not.
Private prisons are a clusterfuck where they take their "involuntary customers" for all the money they and their extended family got while still underpaying their staff and overcharging the tax payers. They often signed contracts with governments that included guaranteed minimal occupancy clauses.
Now imagine applying the same nice principles to other areas where currently the People (represented by their governments) are in charge.
"Thank you for calling 911, a service of Police Corp, a Comcast company. I see you got home intruders. We'll dispatch one of our associate Crime Fight Technicians to your location shortly. Please make sure you're home next Monday between 9m and 5pm to let them in. Would you like to sign up for our premium Home Intruder Plus coverage? Oh wait, I just saw you're located in an area we currently do not serve."
And the Industry Association of Fire Fighting Corporations would be lobbying government right now to change building codes to require more flammable materials in houses.
Agree 100%, if just to stop that element of job anxiety alone. Lose your job, lose your coverage (unless you want to get plowed on COBRA) is a high-risk way to operate.
In the UK we have the NHS and it is so great. There's waiting lists but basically you never worry about healthcare, it's always there when you need it and it's all (pretty much) free at the point of use. It's almost certainly the best thing we've got.
We should probably have something like the an optional "free" government run facility for nose bleeds, sprained ankles, and Viagra prescriptions in the US, but I'll keep my privately funded health care for real problems, thanks.
"The US has a lot of them for profit reasons not necessarily for health reasons."
You seem to suggest that having the availability of life saving equipment is BAD if a profit is being made, but a lack of life saving equipment is GOOD if no profit is being made.
Yes, because machine number doesn't correlate to machine availability. US wait times are often worse than UK wait times for healthcare[0]. Also, would I actually trust facts reported by the dailymail, known for being inaccurate and misleading, especially in matters of science or health?
It’s sort of the national religion that the NHS is “the envy of the world” but it’s really only the envy of the US. Ask any French or German or Egyptian if they are envious of it...
> It’s sort of the national religion that the NHS is “the envy of the world” but it’s really only the envy of the US
I am from Mexico and I envy the NHS. I have had the necessity of using the Health system in NHS, IMSS (Mexico) and Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung (Germany), and from the 3 of them, I will choose the NHS with my eyes closed.
This is the core problem in the United States. The second is increased housing costs in many locations leading to renting vs ownership in many cases (this is easier fought currently by moving).
The two attributes together tie most people into some degree of modern indentured servitude for the very wealthy--there just happen to be many layers in between people and the extremely wealthy trying to obscure that fact.
Yes, there is a degree of freedom of choice but employment policies converge to benefit employers across industry so the choice is between an red and yellow apple.
As an outsider I think other core problems of the US are corporate capture of the legislative process and gerrymandering pushing candidates to extreme positions.
Extreme positions are just the reality of 2019 culture. I was reading a Twitter war about whether or not a professional Hearthstone player was paying enough attention to the game during one of his matches. It was a sea of hate-filled vitriol from both sides. Reading it, I was honestly a little sick to my stomach seeing what social media has become.
If we're going to get that upset over a children's card game, it follows that we're going to get upset over things that actually matter.
For example if you are running for a congressional seat which is 50% republican voters and 50% democrats I would imagine that being a moderate centrist is probably a relatively good strategy.
If the seat is 80% one side then probably you want to be much more extreme in that direction because what the other 20% thinks doesn't matter so much.
However I agree, the internet was meant to make us all open minded and tolerant and yet has had the opposite impact.
That seems like a very narrow view point. We have so much freedom in the US, but many people put blinders on then insist their somehow slaves.
You can buy a house in Tennessee for less than one years rent of a studio apartment in NYC. But you don't want to live there? That makes you a slave to your own desires.
It should be disconnected from _employer_. Whether it’s disconnected from _employment_ is a different question. Some countries cover everyone regardless of employment status, others depend on employment status but isn’t tied to a particular employer. Obviously one is preferred over the other but both are better than health tied to a particular employer.
I agree with you, but how do you address the counterargument that financing health care requires pooling funds at some level, and a company is a logical place to do that seeing as how they have an interest in having everyone come to work on time?
How about “a country is a logical place to do that seeing as how they have an interest in having everyone access to health care and a dignified life”
If you had to design a system from scratch now there is no way you would come up with employer based health insurance. It’s a stupid system. Bad for citizens and bad for employers.
By replying with "workers are human beings and there is no moral reason to allow paperclip-maximizers to have that literally-death grip on the means of their production," generally.
Tying health care to employment is a formative cause of wage slavery. It should not stand--and that's before you even get to the economic inefficiency of the health care market itself.
The government is a more logical way to pool. The enrollment pool coincides perfectly with administrative boundaries so the system becomes simpler to administer. There is a single payer per nation or state (depending on the level of government used as pool).
Really just an excuse to not have any insurance. "Oh, but what about the stress on employers" copout. We all pay for someone if they have a medical emergency, it's a matter of being a citizen, and you know, alive.
As a Canadian, this aspect of the United States health care "system" (if you can call it that) has always baffled me: for a country that blasts its love of capitalism to the whole world, and emphasizes its past revolutionary actions against the old world of aristocrats and monarchs -- this is a glaringly _feudal_ model of health care delivery.
Having employees depend on their lord^H^H^H^Hemployer for their very physical existence... how medieval.
I totally agree, but unfortunately, the very origins of that issue lies squarely in the very cause for why these types of things cannot be solved, because the authoritarian paternalistic types who think they helping just keep making the Gordian Knot bigger and more convoluted instead.
You are looking at it wrong (to be direct). You can get all the health insurance disconnected from employment you want just like any other self-employed and independently affluent people get. It's there, freely available to you. No one is stopping you. Ironically, you can even get that insurance when you are employed, even though you will literally pay a massive penalty for being employed by doing so in the form of the unrealized and hidden cost of the un-utilized employer contribution to the health care cost, which you would then have to pay out of pocket on top of that. (tip, if you want to decouple health insurance from employers, go for the tax advantages of providing health insurance plans ... which touches on the origins of this damn mess caused by the do-gooders fools that demanded employers provide health care in the past).
The real problem is a perception issue that people do not understand the true nature and cost of health insurance/care which also leads them to not understand that their employer puts up many times more in health insurance costs than the premiums the employee pays every month. The problem is a perception problem, and a health care cost problem at its core, and the employment dependency issue is really just a secondary issue that is utterly meaningless.
What does it matter whether you could sever and ban employers from even offering health insurance under a glorious socialist authoritarian regime while racing towards communist demise? Does it matter whether you pay $200 and your employer pays another $700 every month in premiums, or instead your employer simply just adds another $700 to your paycheck per month and you pay the full $900 for health insurance every month out of pocket? All other things being equal, I argue it's the same thing, because math.
Reality is that it's a cost issue that directly is derived from a corruption issue. For example, before the government committed fraud, aka, stole, and handed the health sector (insurance and care) trillions of dollars in profits through the ACA, aka Obamacare, (do not believe me, confirm it yourself if it makes you uncomfortable that I am questioning your messiah Obama, just look at the health sector stock market pre and post ACA [1]), which is one of the sources of corruption that has driven the cost of health care up from (single person example) ~$100/$500 employee/employer split cost for health insurance before ACA to ~$200/$700 post ACA.
The other corruption that has been driving up health care costs and therefore defrauding people is (which his true, regardless of whether one is able to accept it or not) due to the millions of "immigrants" both "legal" and illegal, that have been transported into the USA to defraud the American citizens that are part of the 99%, which put massive amounts of load on the health system with ailments, diseases, and conditions; many of which were essentially unknown and/or eradicated in the whole of the western world before just a few years ago.[2 (which is not quite the full extent but a thread that can be pulled on if one wants] When citizens who are being financially enslaved to pay for the health care of millions of "immigrants" from the third world with degenerative diseases and conditions, it is going to cost and that cost will always be and it is going to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions per individual. And no, that is not an exaggeration. The information can be relatively easily uncovered even though I do not have the ability to pull it up right now for citation.
If he spent a morning conspiring to profit at his employees' expense then he earned more while dreaming of their demise than he actually saved by clawing back their healthcare. AWS alone nets something like a million in profit an hour. This is why we should stop using AWS. AWS is disproportionately enabling this horrible person.
According to the Business Roundtable[0], times have changed, and shareholder value is only part of the purpose of a corporation, and that investment in employees is a vital part of the ultimate value proposition.
Right, the Business Roundtable, led by venerable and respected institutions such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Exxon, Chevron, General Dynamics, and--wait for it-- Amazon.
Absolutely. The headline does Amazon a favor by distancing corporate greed from their actual brand. E.g. this brutality would make me think twice about working as a SWE there.
It would be if you think this message is geared towards only the current set of part-timers who work between 20 and 30 hours a week. In fact, this is a very, very clear message to store leadership to stop scheduling ANY part timers for more than 30 hours a week.
For those who might not read the article, the key here is that they're increasing the minimum hours/week required for the benefit to 30 (from 20). The article suggests they will help those impacted to transition to the longer work week, although that's certainly not an option for everyone.
While technically correct, this assertion has quite the positive Amazon spin on it. They are required by federal law to provide health insurance to employees who work 30 hours or more.
Not only do they not have an incentive to extend the 20-hour folks to 30-hours schedules, they now have a very strong incentive to decrease their current 30+ hour part-timers to 29 hour schedules per week.
When my wife worked retail, this was the standard. Nobody worked more than 29 hours a week. They had people begging for more hours but when the company needed more hours worked, they hired someone new rather than assign any one person more than 29. AFAIK nearly all of retail does this now. If the limit for requiring insurance was 20, they’d cut everyone’s hours to 19 and hire more.
'As for the affected employees, they will be provided “with resources to find alternative healthcare coverage options, or to explore full-time, healthcare-eligible positions starting at 30 hours per week,” the representative added'
If those resources are not money, then the employee is really out of luck as they likely will not be able to afford whatever those alternatives are. In addition, there is no way you can take a bunch of people that work 20 hours per week and let them work 30, no need for that many scheduled hours, just fancy corporate communications.
Amazon has the right to do whatever they want to increase Shareholder value; however, shareholder value is the root of the modern trend of devaluing people and treating them as line items in an expense report. Many of these people likely have this job primarily for the health insurance it provides.
I think it is time for the US to switch to a universal healthcare system. Removing the responsibility of corporations to manage health care would free up a large amount of resources they could invest in expansions, wage increases (likely c-suite bonuses). In addition it would allow individuals, especially working parents to more freely make employment decisions and find careers that are both financially but also emotionally rewarding. I think it would have a major impact on the working structure of this country. Not to mention it would allow people to actually go to the doctor when they need to.
If you have a family, my rough experience is that a good, medium deductible, decent percentage coverage healthcare plan is about $400-500/month if it's employer subsidized. But anywhere from $1300 to $2k+/month if it isn't.
It's a pretty terrible market out there if you don't have an employer subsidizing it and using their size for negotiation leverage.
I agree. My wife's company offers better insurance than mine so I had always been on hers and declined the insurance offered by my company. Her company just implemented a policy stating that if the spouse is eligible for insurance through their own employer there would be a $200 per month surcharge for them electing to use her companies. I understand where her company is coming from but I think we as a nation (US) can do better.
No, we can't. If we could, we would. Things are like this because we want them to be like this: it's reflected in how we vote. We've had candidates pushing for "Medicare for all", universal healthcare, etc., and who gets elected? The candidates promising to go the other direction. Clearly, American society and its voters do not want this.
As an American voter, I definitely don’t want this. Health services, like any economic good, are scarce. I’d rather have rationing through the market then rationing via government (and yes, there has to be rationing; it’s not an unlimited good.) Maybe some poor don’t get the best care quickly, but under a government system, everyone is equally limited in their access to care (i.e. waiting lists.) Someone who provides significant value to society waits in line behind a person who doesn’t provide much value — that isn’t good for society. It’s unsaid because it’s incendiary, but all people in society aren’t equally important to that society: an electrical engineer is more useful than an unemployed cashier. With price-based rationing, those that generate more value have easier access to scarce care resources than those who generate less value. It’s logical, but politically tough because those that generate little value outnumber those that produce high value — and those low value people vote.
> With price-based rationing, those that generate more value have easier access to scarce care resources than those who generate less value.
No, it just means that people who are rich can afford healthcare and those who aren’t can’t.
> It’s logical, but politically tough because those that generate little value outnumber those that produce high value — and those low value people vote.
It's not a XOR proposition. That's why it's called "the public option". If you want alternative health care to what's provided by the government, you can pay for it.
While I disagree with briandear, I don't find it sociopathic.
(It's like the PG said - be aware of what the Taboos/unspeakable ideas are in society.)
I live in Canada as an immigrant, love it here, would never move, and USA health/insurance system frankly baffles me, even having lived there for a year previously. Don't even remotely understand why people put up with sheer complexity and opaqueness.
But I appreciate people like the GP [briandear] that eloquently and clearly help me understand alternative perspectives different to my own. I think it's a very valid, very core discussion of values and goals: is it equal care for all, or do we prioritize it? And I agree with GP [briandear] that shying away from this core discussion muddles the issue. Sometimes it feels like USA builds ever more complex systems to mask the goals and direction of its health care system, rather than a simple system that would fess up and do whatever it's meant to do efficiently :-/
It's only logical if the only value you put on people is someone's ability to pay for things, and assume that that is somehow linked to their ability to "produce" for the betterment of society. The argument really falls down at the extremes - is Jeff Bezos really worth millions of times more to society than one of his workers? Does being born rich automatically make you more valuable?
>Does being born rich automatically make you more valuable?
In the minds of many Americans, yes. We even have many mega-churches here whose doctrine states that rich people are rich because God loves them more. This is why American Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly support Trump.
In reality, the uninsured avoid going to the doctor until its an emergency and then they go the the ER and rack up tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical bills for a problem that if treated proactively by an initial doctor visit could have been resolved with a $15 bottle of antibiotics or something similar.
The poor person obviously cannot afford that bill so the provider eats it and the result is increasing costs for everyone else. So unless the solution is just to let the poor and their children die, providing everyone with access to health care would probably be a net benefit. Not to mention universal health care would provide for incredible bargaining power meaning drugs such as insulin would not cost an individual hundreds of dollars a month.
Everyone with new health insurance is not going to go all at once, I doubt there will be any significant increase in wait time to see a doctor. Finally, people are not units of exchange, they are people and poor or rich they deserve at least a shot at a decent life for them and their family and universal health care goes a long way towards providing that.
>So unless the solution is just to let the poor and their children die
This is exactly what Americans like briandear want, and the political tug-of-war between people like him and people like you is much of why the US healthcare system is the mess that it is.
I'd say briandear proved my earlier point completely: Americans do not want anything like universal healthcare, and no, we really can't do better (by your definition of "better"). Too many Americans are like briandear for that to happen.
Since I can't reply directly to briandear's comment now that it's flagged, I have to ask, why is his comment flagged and now unreadable? He didn't write anything about the rules there that I could see. He expressed an opinion that some people might not like (I certainly find it repulsive), but it's an honest opinion, and I think reflects a large portion of the American electorate, as evidenced by how they vote. Trying to hide this isn't helping.
don't know how it is in the US, so this may look uninformed, but are you getting extra $$$ added to your salary, equivalent to what the employer was paying for the insurance?
No, I don't get the difference. The company keeps what it would pay towards my insurance but I don't have anything deducted from my check for what would be my share of the insurance either.
Edit: My wife though pays more for her company insurance as they would need to insure me as well.
Not typically, but it's possible that someone might be able to negotiate this with their bosses.
Typically people opt out of company insurance because of one of the following reasons: It's cheaper for them to find services through the marketplace (extremely uncommon, but possible), They have superior insurance through a spouse or family member, they feel that the insurance they're provided with isn't sufficient and they would prefer to purchase better insurance themselves.
This is one of the main pain points of health insurance policies in the US that makes it nearly impossible to see if you're getting true value. A monthly premium, a copay per visit, a deductible, co-insurance/cost share and out of pocket maximums. Then factor in potential fees from an employer.
All of that aside, it's impossible to know how much you're actually going to visit the doctor aside from chronic ailments.
Sounds like a good reason to not have a family. Seriously: people should stop doing that until our leaders can make our society so that having kids isn't such a burden. If this means society dies out, then we're getting what we deserve, since we choose these leaders.
It isn’t the employers size as much as it is the group plan risk pool. Employees are better risks than people who have to resort to individual pans. Also, employers don’t pay taxes on what they spend on health insurance, individuals do.
But also that's _if_ you can find coverage. The markets are so screwed up in some states that it's a nightmare of trying to find something you can actually get.
Yes, here in Seattle the cheapest plan on the Obamacare market is $14K/year with a $15K deductible for a family. However low income families can qualify for subsidies.
The USA spends more than double the OECD average(1) in 2014, but is 28th in the world in OECD life expectancy(2) in 2016.
Personal commentary:
As someone from New Zealand, who moved to Canada, I still don't understand why people would want the responsibility of their employer and themselves to choose what health coverage they want in life, especially when employment tenure can be upended so easily.
Yes I know, USA has funky research and new drugs and whatever, but as a whole, it doesn't seem like a particularly efficient system. So if it's not efficient, what's its objective? For me it sounds like prioritising medical providers to extract the maximum amount of revenue from captive customers, in a scheme where all the prices are similar so it's not a monopoly, but none of them are cheap, so it's nearly like a cartel.
If you don't buy into the price rationing argument (I don't) then there is no objective other than enriching the incumbents, it's simply a legacy system. Incremental changes around the margins excepted nothing's going to change until something drastic upsets the apple cart.
> shareholder value is the root of the modern trend of devaluing people and treating them as line items in an expense report.
Private companies also use accounting and sometimes do not look out for their employees.
This isn't to nitpick, I just think there are other parts of the problem, not just shareholder value.
Although, yes, there might be additional pressure from shareholders when a company's finances are public, I don't see how it could be the root of the problem when the same thing happens in private businesses.
Yeah while we are making our Christmas lists.. I want 100k a year salary for doing nothing. Its easy to say "I want X" its hard to say "This is how we can provide X to everyone in an economically feasible way. Here is how we hold people accountable, here is how we address the risk of corruption and abuse". The problem with america is we let our education system devolve to the point where no one knows how to solve big problems, only how to point them out. Consider me a case in point as well..
> Removing the responsibility of corporations to manage health care would free up a large amount of resources they could invest in expansions, wage increases..
Why are wages in Europe lower than the US, even after adjusted for health insurance expenses? Americans have far more disposable cash than Europe even when health insurance is considered. Why is that?
Absolutely agree. The idea that competition will drive up wages rests on the assumption of a labor market with enough liquidity for employees to jump freely between roles. I do not understand the purpose of pinning health care to employers beyond giving them greater leverage over employees.
It is a huge shock for those that haven't been on both sides of employer paying half (or more). But I still agree with you - but we shouldn't be paying THAT much for health care. Right now (under an employee plan) I'm paying about $200 per month (me + wife). When I was on my own I was paying something like $400 for the two of us. That was 5 years ago, looking at the same plans available now, it's no less than $550.
Health insurance is one of the strangest insurances - a single month costs more than a year or often at least 6 months of car insurance.
Honestly I wish someone would just be a whistleblower and reveal the profits and operating costs (claims) of an "expensive year" at a health insurance company. The government would likely have a price collusion case.
I love how “employer paying half” of a so-called benefit has become the norm. I’m old enough to remember when health insurance was an actual full benefit that you didn’t have to pay for at all. It never even showed up on your paystub. No payroll deduction, no or low deductible, sometimes even no copay. You go to the doctor and walk out.
Now we’re paying from our paychecks, then paying again at the doctor, then getting billed, then waiting for the EOB from insurance, then taking hours a month to manually match up the EOBs with the bills to verify who to pay and how much. And then, MAYBE by the end of the year you reach your deductible and insurance starts actually paying.
"Amazon has the right to do whatever they want to increase Shareholder value"
No they don't, they still have to follow relevant laws.
You have a point about universal healthcare, there's a few other things that could help in this situation though. In the EU I believe this would fall foul of anti discrimination laws (this affects only part time workers, part time works are more likely to be women). There are also protections against an employer unilaterally lowering peoples compensation.
These employees are now put into the ACA exchanges. They can shop for insurance there, and their premiums are capped at a certain percentage of their income. The feds cover the difference. Now these employees don't have to rely on their employer for health insurance.
This was the dream of the ACA. Employers would get out of the insurance game and send their employees into the exchanges. It didn't work it out that way in reality, but this is what that looks like.
The best description of the specifics here I've seen came from reddit:
> Leadership has been told that all PT TMs will not be able to work more than 19hrs a week and that even those originally grandfathered from this restriction are now included in this new policy. Additionally, “difficult discussions” would have to take place with these TMs. PBS even sent out a list of all PT TMs in the store that fall into this category. It sounds like a lot of misinformation is circulating throughout the stores and company. Hopefully it will all be sorted out and PT TMs will be able to work up to 29hr weeks.
Amazon Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Whole Foods Employees
I am guessing that due to the food perspective of the blog they focused on the Whole Foods aspect of the story, but this is clearly a dystopian corporation story, not a grocer story.
Whole Foods has 91,000 employees, this effects 1900 of them - a little over 2% of the total or right around 4 people per store.
While it's unfortunate for those effected, it seems mostly a way to get more availability out of their employees rather than purely a cost savings measure.
My brother in law works at Taco Bell and faces a similar problem. He works between 15-25 hours a week at a franchise, and apparently he needs at least 30 hours consistently to be eligible for insurance. He has asked multiple times to have his hours increased, but they have repeatedly denied him. He can't afford to pay for a plan (which start at around $400/month in NYC), and since he got his green card only two years ago, he can't apply for any kind of government assistance on this.
The really frustrating part of this also comes with the fact that he's trying to get his GED to hopefully get a higher-paying job with benefits, but the GED exam apparently requires that you have coverage.
The GED requires that you have health insurance to take it? I looked around for more information about this, but I can't seem to find anything. Do you have more information?
I took my GED back in 2009 and I don't remember having to supply any information about whether I was insured.
I'm middle of the road. Hard working and highly paid. Healthcare in the USA is broken beyond belief. I pay over 300 bi-weekly for family coverage and high deductibles beyond that. It goes higher each year. My employer pays over nearly 800 per week. I'm not using what I pay and honestly feel we're getting to a point where even a highly paid associate is going to drop out of this garbage plan and just go to the hospital or urgent care and pay out of pocket. Something needs to be done about healthcare! I'm boycotting Amazon for this.
Healthcare is about 18% of GDP or about a $3470 billion a year. It should be shrunk down to about 12%, but that would require terminating millions of employees who work in healthcare and are the major cost component. The industry also needs to get rid of lots of real estate. Shrinking healthcare would cause a bigger bloodbath in commercial real estate than the one currently going on in retail stores.
just playing a amz-devil advocate, what is the point of hiring part-time employees who earn 30-40K a year and pay them just as much in health benefits? america's health care costs are out of this world and that is a much tougher problem to tackle as opposed to who is paying for it
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadGun ownership, electoral college, for profit prisons (slavery), etc. Those are all things that made some sense back in the past but still exist.
The Taliban aren't joking.
You are grossly under-estimating what it takes to fight an insurgency. A military fighting in the same country on which it depends is vulnerable to attacks and sabotage on all its support infrastructure. You can't just carpet bomb areas of resistance because that creates more resistance elsewhere or destroy the country you're trying to control. It's a hard problem and on some level you have to get people on "your side" to win in any sort of long term sense.
And to the commenter who said modern militaries could never be stopped by small militias, you have only to look seriously at our adventures in Afghanistan and the fact that we're still there. The AK 47 is a less accurate, high-recoil stamped out piece of garbage compared to the AR 15, and it's all you need to stop a modern military in its tracks for decades.
Police forces are heavily militarized because of the bonkers amount of money thrown at them in the name of the "War on Drugs" and more recent "War on Terror". Note the connection between "war" and an increasingly militarized police force.
A better response to mass shootings would be to desensationalize the media coverage, which since Columbine has been indulging the shooters' motives to shock society.
Incidentally though this whole thread is grossly off-topic and I expect it will be collapsed or detached.
Gun laws haven’t gotten laxer in the last couple decades either - many states have strengthened them. There isn’t a clear connection between weak gun laws and mass shootings.
(That said, a total and effective ban on guns would of course stop mass shootings and other gun violence - if it could be implemented successfully)
But then, the cherrypicked, tautological nature of this goal is elided by gun control advocates--reducing gun violence without addressing the root social causes of violence is just a shell game.
Do you have to list all the things you aren't protecting your home with?
Unarmed riot can be dispersed using tear gas etc, no need to kill the civilians. Armed riot requires actually killing the opposition.
While government will almost certainly succeed in killing the militia the international opinion is wholly different in that case. 10000 person protesters dispersed vs 10000 killed.
Any pro gunner will tell you that the 2nd amendment is sacred, except it’s first clause, that’s meaningless.
Look, I'm all for stricter gun laws, but at the same time not everyone lives in a (sub)(ex)urban area and a blanket ban simply will not work.
"When seconds count, the police are only minutes away"
You can sorta maybe make the argument that the elctoral college should be to make sure someone unfit shouldn't be put in, by using their sense of judgement. Well that obviously failed, and you are advocating getting rid of that potential benefit.
Why not get rid of the entire anti-democratic idea and just vote for the president.
Remember, this body of representatives was the one that managed to stall Obama's Supreme Court nominee until a new President was elected. That is a lot of power.
There will never be a President that everyone wants. The way to make the most people happy is to put into power the one that the most people voted for.
Why not get rid of the entire anti-democratic idea of voting for representatives altogether and just vote directly on issues?
The senate gives equal representation to each state.
The electoral college gives each state a degree of representation approximately proportional to its population, but the approximation is somewhat poor.
However, the Senate isn't "like" the Electoral College. The Senate is what makes Congress like the EC...or vice versa.
So if you believe the US isn't a collection of united states, which is why the senate exists and why the EC exists, then it is only rational to argue against both intuitions.
Not saying that's precisely my position...
In one hand you say it's a bad thing, on the other its OK. It's not logical and the only way I can explain it is being sore losers of the last election.
I keep hearing how Trump is going to destroy our Constitution, but I also keep hearing from leftist how we need to change the first amendment, the second amendment, and the EC.
With all the flaws current system have, governments are at least accountable (on paper) to the citizens. Corporations are not.
Private prisons are a clusterfuck where they take their "involuntary customers" for all the money they and their extended family got while still underpaying their staff and overcharging the tax payers. They often signed contracts with governments that included guaranteed minimal occupancy clauses.
Now imagine applying the same nice principles to other areas where currently the People (represented by their governments) are in charge.
"Thank you for calling 911, a service of Police Corp, a Comcast company. I see you got home intruders. We'll dispatch one of our associate Crime Fight Technicians to your location shortly. Please make sure you're home next Monday between 9m and 5pm to let them in. Would you like to sign up for our premium Home Intruder Plus coverage? Oh wait, I just saw you're located in an area we currently do not serve."
And the Industry Association of Fire Fighting Corporations would be lobbying government right now to change building codes to require more flammable materials in houses.
I don't even see the UK on these lists.
CT Scanners: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266539/distribution-of-e...
MRI Machines: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282401/density-of-magnet...
Perhaps the UK should be on the list, but somewhere near the bottom:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2672902/Deadly-shor...
Granted it's from 2014, but are you disputing the following facts as reported then?
"The report shows the UK has only 5.9 MRI units per million people, less than half the OECD average of 13.3."
"On CT scanners we are 30th out of 32 countries, in front of only Hungary and Mexico. The numbers concern only NHS scanners."
The source is irrelevant.
You seem to suggest that having the availability of life saving equipment is BAD if a profit is being made, but a lack of life saving equipment is GOOD if no profit is being made.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/25/gp-appointme...
I imagine if the story is credible, the issues wouldn't just be with cancer treatment.
It’s sort of the national religion that the NHS is “the envy of the world” but it’s really only the envy of the US. Ask any French or German or Egyptian if they are envious of it...
I am from Mexico and I envy the NHS. I have had the necessity of using the Health system in NHS, IMSS (Mexico) and Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung (Germany), and from the 3 of them, I will choose the NHS with my eyes closed.
The two attributes together tie most people into some degree of modern indentured servitude for the very wealthy--there just happen to be many layers in between people and the extremely wealthy trying to obscure that fact.
Yes, there is a degree of freedom of choice but employment policies converge to benefit employers across industry so the choice is between an red and yellow apple.
If we're going to get that upset over a children's card game, it follows that we're going to get upset over things that actually matter.
For example if you are running for a congressional seat which is 50% republican voters and 50% democrats I would imagine that being a moderate centrist is probably a relatively good strategy.
If the seat is 80% one side then probably you want to be much more extreme in that direction because what the other 20% thinks doesn't matter so much.
However I agree, the internet was meant to make us all open minded and tolerant and yet has had the opposite impact.
That seems like a very narrow view point. We have so much freedom in the US, but many people put blinders on then insist their somehow slaves.
You can buy a house in Tennessee for less than one years rent of a studio apartment in NYC. But you don't want to live there? That makes you a slave to your own desires.
So what is your point?
If you had to design a system from scratch now there is no way you would come up with employer based health insurance. It’s a stupid system. Bad for citizens and bad for employers.
Tying health care to employment is a formative cause of wage slavery. It should not stand--and that's before you even get to the economic inefficiency of the health care market itself.
This has several unintended consequences:
1) People stay in jobs they hate just for the insurance. This harms both the company and the individual.
2) It reduces entrepreneurship. In Canada if I want to start my own company, I don't have to worry about losing health insurance.
3) Children don't work (yet I guess) and old people don't work, so you need other systems to cover them, or just not cover them at all.
Are there any groups that offer health insurance (at a cost) with membership? Ex: IEEE, entrepreneurial groups, etc.
I don't have to pay anything for my health coverage.
And before you say, I do through taxes, my tax rate can be pretty low if I have minimal income, which is often the case when starting a new business.
Now why dental is not part of medical coverage is beyond me, but that's another topic.
Having employees depend on their lord^H^H^H^Hemployer for their very physical existence... how medieval.
You are looking at it wrong (to be direct). You can get all the health insurance disconnected from employment you want just like any other self-employed and independently affluent people get. It's there, freely available to you. No one is stopping you. Ironically, you can even get that insurance when you are employed, even though you will literally pay a massive penalty for being employed by doing so in the form of the unrealized and hidden cost of the un-utilized employer contribution to the health care cost, which you would then have to pay out of pocket on top of that. (tip, if you want to decouple health insurance from employers, go for the tax advantages of providing health insurance plans ... which touches on the origins of this damn mess caused by the do-gooders fools that demanded employers provide health care in the past).
The real problem is a perception issue that people do not understand the true nature and cost of health insurance/care which also leads them to not understand that their employer puts up many times more in health insurance costs than the premiums the employee pays every month. The problem is a perception problem, and a health care cost problem at its core, and the employment dependency issue is really just a secondary issue that is utterly meaningless.
What does it matter whether you could sever and ban employers from even offering health insurance under a glorious socialist authoritarian regime while racing towards communist demise? Does it matter whether you pay $200 and your employer pays another $700 every month in premiums, or instead your employer simply just adds another $700 to your paycheck per month and you pay the full $900 for health insurance every month out of pocket? All other things being equal, I argue it's the same thing, because math.
Reality is that it's a cost issue that directly is derived from a corruption issue. For example, before the government committed fraud, aka, stole, and handed the health sector (insurance and care) trillions of dollars in profits through the ACA, aka Obamacare, (do not believe me, confirm it yourself if it makes you uncomfortable that I am questioning your messiah Obama, just look at the health sector stock market pre and post ACA [1]), which is one of the sources of corruption that has driven the cost of health care up from (single person example) ~$100/$500 employee/employer split cost for health insurance before ACA to ~$200/$700 post ACA.
The other corruption that has been driving up health care costs and therefore defrauding people is (which his true, regardless of whether one is able to accept it or not) due to the millions of "immigrants" both "legal" and illegal, that have been transported into the USA to defraud the American citizens that are part of the 99%, which put massive amounts of load on the health system with ailments, diseases, and conditions; many of which were essentially unknown and/or eradicated in the whole of the western world before just a few years ago.[2 (which is not quite the full extent but a thread that can be pulled on if one wants] When citizens who are being financially enslaved to pay for the health care of millions of "immigrants" from the third world with degenerative diseases and conditions, it is going to cost and that cost will always be and it is going to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions per individual. And no, that is not an exaggeration. The information can be relatively easily uncovered even though I do not have the ability to pull it up right now for citation.
[1] Ididntdothis ↗ What are you trying to say?
You can complain about the system but its silly to call names at the people who play the system best.
[0] - https://opportunity.businessroundtable.org/ourcommitment/
It's virtue signaling.
If those resources are not money, then the employee is really out of luck as they likely will not be able to afford whatever those alternatives are. In addition, there is no way you can take a bunch of people that work 20 hours per week and let them work 30, no need for that many scheduled hours, just fancy corporate communications.
Amazon has the right to do whatever they want to increase Shareholder value; however, shareholder value is the root of the modern trend of devaluing people and treating them as line items in an expense report. Many of these people likely have this job primarily for the health insurance it provides.
I think it is time for the US to switch to a universal healthcare system. Removing the responsibility of corporations to manage health care would free up a large amount of resources they could invest in expansions, wage increases (likely c-suite bonuses). In addition it would allow individuals, especially working parents to more freely make employment decisions and find careers that are both financially but also emotionally rewarding. I think it would have a major impact on the working structure of this country. Not to mention it would allow people to actually go to the doctor when they need to.
It's a pretty terrible market out there if you don't have an employer subsidizing it and using their size for negotiation leverage.
No, we can't. If we could, we would. Things are like this because we want them to be like this: it's reflected in how we vote. We've had candidates pushing for "Medicare for all", universal healthcare, etc., and who gets elected? The candidates promising to go the other direction. Clearly, American society and its voters do not want this.
Just because Universal Healthcare didn't catch on the first time doesn't mean it's dead forever.
It'll happen eventually. Maybe in 4 years, maybe in 40.
No, it just means that people who are rich can afford healthcare and those who aren’t can’t.
> It’s logical, but politically tough because those that generate little value outnumber those that produce high value — and those low value people vote.
Should they not?
I live in Canada as an immigrant, love it here, would never move, and USA health/insurance system frankly baffles me, even having lived there for a year previously. Don't even remotely understand why people put up with sheer complexity and opaqueness.
But I appreciate people like the GP [briandear] that eloquently and clearly help me understand alternative perspectives different to my own. I think it's a very valid, very core discussion of values and goals: is it equal care for all, or do we prioritize it? And I agree with GP [briandear] that shying away from this core discussion muddles the issue. Sometimes it feels like USA builds ever more complex systems to mask the goals and direction of its health care system, rather than a simple system that would fess up and do whatever it's meant to do efficiently :-/
In the minds of many Americans, yes. We even have many mega-churches here whose doctrine states that rich people are rich because God loves them more. This is why American Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly support Trump.
The poor person obviously cannot afford that bill so the provider eats it and the result is increasing costs for everyone else. So unless the solution is just to let the poor and their children die, providing everyone with access to health care would probably be a net benefit. Not to mention universal health care would provide for incredible bargaining power meaning drugs such as insulin would not cost an individual hundreds of dollars a month.
Everyone with new health insurance is not going to go all at once, I doubt there will be any significant increase in wait time to see a doctor. Finally, people are not units of exchange, they are people and poor or rich they deserve at least a shot at a decent life for them and their family and universal health care goes a long way towards providing that.
This is exactly what Americans like briandear want, and the political tug-of-war between people like him and people like you is much of why the US healthcare system is the mess that it is.
I'd say briandear proved my earlier point completely: Americans do not want anything like universal healthcare, and no, we really can't do better (by your definition of "better"). Too many Americans are like briandear for that to happen.
> an electrical engineer is more useful than an unemployed cashier.
And then we jumped into the Randian deep end. Peace, I'm out.
don't know how it is in the US, so this may look uninformed, but are you getting extra $$$ added to your salary, equivalent to what the employer was paying for the insurance?
Edit: My wife though pays more for her company insurance as they would need to insure me as well.
Typically people opt out of company insurance because of one of the following reasons: It's cheaper for them to find services through the marketplace (extremely uncommon, but possible), They have superior insurance through a spouse or family member, they feel that the insurance they're provided with isn't sufficient and they would prefer to purchase better insurance themselves.
All of that aside, it's impossible to know how much you're actually going to visit the doctor aside from chronic ailments.
Personal commentary:
As someone from New Zealand, who moved to Canada, I still don't understand why people would want the responsibility of their employer and themselves to choose what health coverage they want in life, especially when employment tenure can be upended so easily.
Yes I know, USA has funky research and new drugs and whatever, but as a whole, it doesn't seem like a particularly efficient system. So if it's not efficient, what's its objective? For me it sounds like prioritising medical providers to extract the maximum amount of revenue from captive customers, in a scheme where all the prices are similar so it's not a monopoly, but none of them are cheap, so it's nearly like a cartel.
Citations: (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Private companies also use accounting and sometimes do not look out for their employees.
This isn't to nitpick, I just think there are other parts of the problem, not just shareholder value.
Although, yes, there might be additional pressure from shareholders when a company's finances are public, I don't see how it could be the root of the problem when the same thing happens in private businesses.
Why are wages in Europe lower than the US, even after adjusted for health insurance expenses? Americans have far more disposable cash than Europe even when health insurance is considered. Why is that?
Health insurance is one of the strangest insurances - a single month costs more than a year or often at least 6 months of car insurance.
Honestly I wish someone would just be a whistleblower and reveal the profits and operating costs (claims) of an "expensive year" at a health insurance company. The government would likely have a price collusion case.
Now we’re paying from our paychecks, then paying again at the doctor, then getting billed, then waiting for the EOB from insurance, then taking hours a month to manually match up the EOBs with the bills to verify who to pay and how much. And then, MAYBE by the end of the year you reach your deductible and insurance starts actually paying.
They call this a benefit??
No they don't, they still have to follow relevant laws.
You have a point about universal healthcare, there's a few other things that could help in this situation though. In the EU I believe this would fall foul of anti discrimination laws (this affects only part time workers, part time works are more likely to be women). There are also protections against an employer unilaterally lowering peoples compensation.
These employees are now put into the ACA exchanges. They can shop for insurance there, and their premiums are capped at a certain percentage of their income. The feds cover the difference. Now these employees don't have to rely on their employer for health insurance.
This was the dream of the ACA. Employers would get out of the insurance game and send their employees into the exchanges. It didn't work it out that way in reality, but this is what that looks like.
> Leadership has been told that all PT TMs will not be able to work more than 19hrs a week and that even those originally grandfathered from this restriction are now included in this new policy. Additionally, “difficult discussions” would have to take place with these TMs. PBS even sent out a list of all PT TMs in the store that fall into this category. It sounds like a lot of misinformation is circulating throughout the stores and company. Hopefully it will all be sorted out and PT TMs will be able to work up to 29hr weeks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wholefoods/comments/d3r04k/amazons_...
Amazon Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Whole Foods Employees
I am guessing that due to the food perspective of the blog they focused on the Whole Foods aspect of the story, but this is clearly a dystopian corporation story, not a grocer story.
While it's unfortunate for those effected, it seems mostly a way to get more availability out of their employees rather than purely a cost savings measure.
The really frustrating part of this also comes with the fact that he's trying to get his GED to hopefully get a higher-paying job with benefits, but the GED exam apparently requires that you have coverage.
I took my GED back in 2009 and I don't remember having to supply any information about whether I was insured.
I can ask him tonight for clarification.