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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.
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Health insurance has always been a huge game of numbers and betting on the odds. Betting on the odds that you are, or aren't going to get sick, are or aren't going to need major medical, are or aren't going to need an operation, etc. And in that big game, the more people you have on the plan, the more likely you're going to find alot of people who pay you for insurance, but don't need those things.
..when will we get to have /. insurance? Any web-following then, with sufficient numbers, should be able to follow suit and get big discounts on a group plan. With enough people, you even get to have the nice and spiffy plans where you can pick the sort of benefits you want.
An insurance company is out to make money, just like you and me, who get a job to make money (or sell things on eBay in this case.) 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.
This will be an interesting precident to set in the marketplace of health insurance. If it goes through and works,
Whose going to manage these benefits? Will eBay have a new department for assisting their people with benefit claims?
Hmm...imagine if http://www.yahoo.com/ or http://www.msn.com/ were able to follow suit and offer health insurance. Anyone else think there's a web-organization that can claim more members?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Trying to eliminate? I don't see how they are trying to _eliminate_ you. They haven't made your life any harder; they just have made life a bit easier for the folk that bring them a significant amount of revenue. Explain to me how this makes life _harder_ for the small folk? Just because it got easier for someone else doesn't mean ebay is trying to shut out small sellers.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
What you say is true, but is the rest of the insurance industry any better? They operate on a principle that only makes a profit if they don't deliver a service. Also someone under this plan wouldn't be in constant danger of losing thier insurance by virture of bieng fired by Ebay.
On another note, I didn't realize there were that many people who made ebay (more or less) a full time job. I imagine someone who invests that much into ebay is more tolerant of risk than most people (same could be said of all self-employed).
I live in a small town of about 5,000. There's a junk dealer that turned into a full time e-bay seller. He makes money by handling all the e-bay stuff for people in the area. People drop off the stuff they want to sell, and he takes pictures of it and handles the shipping, all for a percentage of the sale price.
So I have to keep my account in good standing? That means if some malichious little brat decides he doesn't like me and makes up all sorts of slander and negative feedback I can lose my eBay healt insurance? Or by good standing do they simply mean paying my auctions fees? Anyone have any input?
Ebay to Insurance company: "We have the names and addresses of 80,000+ people that spend so much time on our site, they probably don't have a real job or benefits."
Insurance Company to Ebay: "Cool. We'll call them a group and give you 5% of the premiums that they pay for the first 5 years"
Next Step. Big announcement.
SM MBL-VIR looking 4 SIG 4 LTR. must be DDF, no 420, SD ok.
> 1. Why do I need to be told a login is required? Won't I find that out soon enough?
I would waste more time trying to load a slashdotted page than reading a sentence fragment and deciding that since I'm not going to register anyway I might as well just go to the comments and hope someone has whored the story.
I'm of mixed opinion on the reference. On one hand, it's childish and, as you indicated, is trying to be "hip". On the other hand, I'd rather have bad personality than none at all. I view slashdot as a community, not a newsfeed. If I want a newsfeed, I can check out Newsforge or C|Net or CNN's Tech section and get it there. I come to Slashdot because of the (sometimes) insightful commentary coming from people who know more than I do about a subject, and the occasional amusement from some troll who has been modded up. Sense of aquaitance is important. I don't want hemos and cmdtaco and whoever aloof from Slashdot's user base (even though they sometimes seem to be from themselves) - the site looses a lot of its appeal because it becomes just another newsfeed I'll check a few times a day.