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Uber CEO Urges 'Portable Benefits' for Gig Economy Workers (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Hill:
Uber's chief executive is calling for Washington state to develop a "portable benefits system" to give contract workers in the so-called gig economy access to health care and retirement planning accounts. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi signed onto a letter with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 775 President David Rolf and Seattle investor and workers rights advocate Nick Hanauer urging the state to take action.
Uber does not hire drivers as actual employees meaning the company does not offer them benefits beyond compensation. Khosrowshahi said having the state change laws so that contract workers can carry benefits between jobs would be preferable to Uber hiring them as full employees.
Uber does not hire drivers as actual employees meaning the company does not offer them benefits beyond compensation. Khosrowshahi said having the state change laws so that contract workers can carry benefits between jobs would be preferable to Uber hiring them as full employees.
But the ACA was a cobbled together mess that didn't solve that problem regardless of what it was intended to do.
Near as I can tell it was just a gift to insurance companies because it allows them to have higher overall profits, because now everyone is (theoretically) forced to buy insurance policies (which in some cases that they can't even really afford to use, but that's a side issue) which means overall revenue for the companies goes up, so even though they still pay out the required ~80% percentage of that in health care claims, they still an overall increase in the remaining ~20%. There's also an incentive to keep increasing the cost of health care as that just means that the remaining ~20% is even larger. There's some other bad behavior that's incentivized since they can't really force you to buy it, so you can get away with not doing it, which may be the best financial decision for a lot of people, especially since they can always buy the insurance only when they need to use it since presence of a pre-existing condition doesn't disqualify them from purchasing insurance now.
I think that if that government wanted to do things sanely, they'd handle emergency room visit costs and the like since hospitals are required to treat people which creates some similarly bad incentives in terms of behavior, but that's another aside. That way if the government feels someone is abusing the ER, they can easily garnish wages or take other actions to remedy the issue. Beyond that, they should just get out of healthcare entirely. If they want to provide some kind of portable benefits, just create a basic income because sometimes people need to buy a car to get to a new job or to purchase food more than they need a guarantee of medical care. Making hospitals have a list price for treatments would probably go a long way as well, because that lets consumers make price decisions just like they do at grocery stores, retail outlets, etc.
The idea of "benefits" being attached to your job is a holdover from the wage & price controls enacted during World War II. Unable to increase wages, factories offered non-cash benefits like health care to attract skilled workers, and later the courts ruled that these health benefits were not taxable income. In the most extreme example, a shipyard started a medical clinic to provide medical care for shipyard workers and their families. Now the shipyard is long gone, but the medical clinic has grown into its own hospital chain; Kaiser.
Abolish all that! Allow fraternal organizations to offer medical insurance. Let everybody pay for their own insurance, and pensions, and other "fringe benefits", and you eliminate the problem of "pre-existing conditions". A young adult would choose his/her own fraternal organization such as the Kiwanis or Knights of Columbus or Masons or Odd Fellows. You could go from employer to employer, and NEVER lose your health insurance.
The US concept that health insurance is tied to your employer is simultaneously anti-capitalistic and anti-socialist. In this system, nobody wins. We don't do it with anything else in our society: Not your car insurance, homeowners insurance, flood insurance, liability insurance, internet, telephone, food, electricity, or anything else. "Portable" insurance isn't some crazy idea, it just means "treat insurance like every other thing in society."