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Working Off the Clock, How Much Is Too Much?
The Wall Street Journal has word of yet another suit against an employer who required an "always on" mentality to persist because of easily available communications. Most of us working in some sort of tech related job are working more than 40 hours per week (or at least lead the lifestyle of always working), but how much is too much? What methods have others used in the past to help an employer see the line between work and personal life without resorting to a legal attack? "Greg Rasin, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP, a New York business law firm, said the recession may spawn wage-and-hour disputes as employers try to do the same amount of work with fewer people. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act says employees must be paid for work performed off the clock, even if the work was voluntary. When the law was passed in 1938, 'work' was easy to define for hourly employees, said Mr. McCoy. As the workplace changed, so did the rules for when workers should be paid."
You can't separate health care from the economy because the proposed changes are going to destroy the economy. Look at the Medicare system for an example of what government run health care will be like. Medicare is a gigantic Ponzi scheme that is scheduled to explode around 2018.
If you truly want to make health care more affordable, you have got to get rid insurance company lobbyists *and* trial lawyer lobbyists. We need comprehensive tort reform, and we need to promote price competition between health care providers. Consider this, Lasik eye surgery is not covered by most insurances, so most people have to pay for it themselves. Yet price competition has driven the cost down *drastically* in the past decade.
With enough competition, prices drop to the point where you don't need insurance for anything but catastrophic care. This whole concept of using insurance for routine care is part of the problem.
With enough competition, prices drop to the point where you don't need insurance for anything but catastrophic care.
Great. So if you develop anything that's chronic, you're royally screwed. Same goes if you insurance companys definition of catastrophic differs from yours (hint: they'll find something in those dozens of finely-printed pages that you signed to deny you coverage).
Also, competition does nothing for emergencies. Go to the closest hospital or bleed to death, and accept whatever they bill you (an arbitrary number they made up) , right? (Hint: Lasik surgery is, in the majority of the cases, neither necessary nor especially urgent. It's a cosmetic procedure for most patients. It is therefore not a very good indicator of developments in the healthcare sector).