eBay To Offer Health Insurance

Logic Bomb writes "EBay has announced it will be offering group health coverage for "full time eBay merchants". Anyone who grosses over $1000/month in sales -- at least a whopping 80,000 users in good standing -- will be eligible to buy into a typical "employee" health plan. This is a big first in the Internet world. Full details from the LA Times." And the LA Times, trying to cop a pose from the NY Times, reqs a login.

Comments

No Reg Copy of Story

[LISNews]

Houston Chronicle has the story available with no register.

.com users equal to employees?

[totallygeek]

Could I just simply start calling the users of www.dmarien.com my employees?

They could all be considered independent contractors if their purpose of being a user of your site is to generate funds for your company and they have signed an agreement as such. When we sign up for an eBay account, we make such an agreement.

Let us look at Slashdot. For them to do the same they would need to demonstrate that the funds they make are a direct result of user activity. This is not so clear in their case because while the site wouldn't make any money with no users, it becomes questionable they can determine a scale for each user's contribution to their bottom line. If they had some pay for play, those items could qualify, but the numbers would need to be staggering. Don't forget that eBay is not paying this insurance, rather the qualified members would pay their own.

HMO's are cheap

[BlingBlings]

If your single and just need insurance because your self-employed go with a major HMO. They won't cost you much at all, probably less than dealing with ebay's system.
Plus you don't need to be in good standing with ebay to use it.
"oh no sir, I'm sorry, we can't operate until you take the link to your webstore off your auction pages"

Re:HMO's are cheap

[truthsearch]

Self-employed purchase of health insurance is very expensive. Maybe you live in the middle of nowhere and the rates are cheap, or maybe you're smoking some really good crack ;), but in the NYC metro area, if you're self-employed it costs a small fortune to buy health insurance from anyone. HMOs and others charge much higher fees to self-employed individuals than to corporations (per person). That's one reason why there's a larger federal tax break for money spent on health insurance when you're self-employed (there's an additional Schedule (E?) that you have to fill out if you don't work for someone else's corporation). So I'm sure the "bulk" insurance that E-Bay is selling is cheaper per person than buying it alone. E-Bay's insentive may partly be for the tax benefits.

Re:HMO's are cheap

[M'Barr]

FYI: for those in NYC & NY state, there is a program that offers very inexpensive access to the HMO's. I'm not a hundred percent sure of how much the government is picking up, but it's called Healthy NY.

It is available for uninsured working individuals, sole proprietors, and small buisness owners. They each have their own rules. However, the prices are in the 180-220 /month, and covers most of the necessary things in medicine. It is offered by *all* HMO's that operate in New York State. Same coverage, different administation, and networks, yields the price difference.

Not Employees

[malarkey]

Just because ebay is offering group insurance to this group of individuals does not mean that it's costing ebay anything. Other groups, such as owner-operator truckers have plans available to them for being members of a group.

Chamber of Commerce plans do the same thing for small businesses. The group buying power is what helps lower the rates.

So this insurance still ends up costing the Power Sellers more per month than most plans they would get as employees, because ebay isn't pitching in the 50-70% that many employers do.

L.A. Times?

[webword]

Why bother...

Read about it on CNET without the hassle.

NOT EMPLOYEES!

[chill]

To all those wondering how auction sellers qualify as employees -- a quick "find text" in the article doesn't turn up any form of the word "employ".

This is simply a group policy, like those you can get thru the National Association of the Self-Employed, or dozens of other small-business and "group" organizations.

All you need for group discounts is a large group -- they don't have to be co-workers. E-Bay isn't contributing to the funds.

Re:Numbers talk..

[PMuse]

Health insurance has always been a huge game of numbers and betting on the odds. . . . So, if you offer them a large customer base, 80,000 people, then that's a big enough market you start to drop your prices signifigantely. . . .

Whose going to manage these benefits? Will eBay have a new department for assisting their people with benefit claims?

What an insurer needs in order to spread risk is a large pool of people selected for some criteria not related to their health/propensity to make claims. The healthy group members pay and don't claim, while the unhealthy members claim a lot more than they pay, and the system works. Traditionally, such groups have been {all employees of a given company}. EBay is a good candidate for a new type of group. What will not work is any internet community that is self-selecting on the basis of wanting health insurance. Such groups will contain too high a percentage of unhealthy people.

EBay will be pretty limited as a precedent, I think. EBay's members have to really commit to EBay (be high volume sellers) to get covered. It's not as easy as saying, "I think I'll switch ISPs to Earthlink because I like the health plan."

On another note, it's not trivial to offer health insurance to a national group. Most health insurers have regional networks of physicians and services. (This is partly because insurance is licensed on a state by state basis.) Some few have enough regional networks to be effectively national, but you can bet that people outside population centers are going to find they have somewhat limited choices when it comes to selecting physicians near them. EBay sellers have got to be just about the most geographically diverse insurance group ever attempted. Many, many employers have one or a few locations, e.g. a plant. EBay users don't have any locations/concentrations other than the fact that more of them will be found in cities because that's where the people are.

Still and all, more power to 'em, I say.

Re:Hey

[guttentag]

And the LA Times, trying to cop a pose from the NY Times, reqs a login.

Someone set up an easy-to-remember, stick-it-to-em login for NYTimes.com:

Username: nopassword
Password: nopassword

So I took the liberty of setting up the same thing at LATimes.com. Feel free to use it, and set up the same username/password combo at other sites.

Re:eBay and health insurance coverage

[mercynre]

yep, actually as far as new subdirectories go, i belong to a group of online self-representing artists (ebsq) which does have a contract with eBay. eBay recently introduced a new category for self-representing artists, so that they could list separately from people selling mass-produced prints, and works from galleries. introducing that category was a big step in separating collectible art from mass-produced art, so they are listening. i think it's going to be really interesting to read the full details of coverage and how it can be affected (bad sales month, etc). offering health insurance is a humane move, if they can actually get it to work out.