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Maybe we could push public healthcare if we rephrase it as subsidizing companies, might as well try right?
I’ve been saying for years that we need to frame it as an issue of international market competitiveness. GM and Ford, for example, could be more competitive on price with Honda and Toyota if they weren’t paying for health insurance for their current employees and pensioners.
So I recently read “dying of whiteness” after seeing someone go on about it here. There’s apparently a lot of people that would rather personally die than let black people have health insurance
Even Trump before said he favoured affordable healthcare because it means not tying healthcare to employers. Now, he did a u-turn probably because he’s going senile and having been bought by the insurance industry.
They want to get rid of the only thing that keeps 90% of people working at shit jobs, thats some real consultant level smarts right there.
Wait, you mean I can get healthcare in prison?
I doubt its good quality healthcare, and you’ll probably still be forced into slave labor, only being paid 7.5cents an hour instead of 7.50 an hour.
And they can just deny it to you without any repercussions.
Push everyone onto the private market and jack the prices up with worse service. Just like everything else.
Because even though the employer health care was shitty for a lot of reasons it did have one thing going for it: the ability of a powerful corporation to negotiate the best rates it could in order to keep its costs down.
If it’s no longer tied to jobs, we lose that last advantage.
If the market worked, sure. Eventually it became a selling point that looks acceptable to job applicants, but is practically useless when needed. Tons of market failures because of all the monopolies.
I’m not arguing in favor of employer health care. I’m only pointing out the single benefit it offered vs health care being run like Netflix or any other subscription service that enshittifies further and charges you more every chance it gets.
But in reality we don’t get that collective bargaining benefit at all because the employer doesn’t represent our interests. They’re getting the entire surplus.
Imagine a corrupt union, that bargains on your behalf but takes nearly all the surplus. Your employer is even worse than that.
I don’t disagree with any of that. The corporation is negotiating for itself, not us.
There was another reason: Employer-provided health insurance is not taxed as income in the US. This is the main reason healthcare is tied to employment.
I know of no place that cites the taxes as a “benefit” or a main reason.
Health care was tied to employment as a means to attract workers. That’s it. The fact any of it is untaxed is at the whim of the government, not the employer. If anything the employer-based health care is a shackle, you lose your job or get fired you lose insurance.
I’m sure if enough people get kicked off employer health care or enough corpos say they’re no longer offering it the government will allow some sort of pre-tax or no-tax income allowance to individuals based on reported health insurance costs.
Maybe.
I don’t understand the connection, tbh.
Slavery never went away in 'Murica
It was just rebranded
Or switching to worse providers, like UHC of all things.
I really struggle to understand HR’s thought process there, seeing the news and still deciding to make that choice.
My understanding is HR’s thought process is “… … … … … … … … …”
Yes! It was a horrible idea.
But this is a good thing. People think employers actually pay for their benefits. That’s not how total compensation works.
We need this. It won’t be easy but we need this.
Yeah, it’s bad for we poors. But we’re not the ones in power.
We’re only allowed to have beneficial laws that don’t cost the billionaires something.
Only for the employed.
Thank you, corrupt Union leaders, for being just like the oligarchs you are supposed to oppose.
Both sides might be bad but one is clearly worse than the other.
I bet you are a “blue no matter who” voter.
Nope, go ahead and form another union
From what I can tell from this article, Disney isn’t covering spouses who have their own healthcare coverage through their jobs, Starbucks is not covering GLP-1 as much, and Deloitte is reducing paid parental leave and IVF.
