The U.S. Labor Market Isn’t All That Healthy

Re:The U.S. Labor Market Isn’t All That Healthy by rayiner on Monday July 08, 2019 @01:54PM (#20385047)

That makes no sense. If your employer paid your rent, would that not be compensation to you? After all, you need housing even more than you need health care. Sure, there’s ancillary benefits to the employer from paying your health insurance. But that’s true of your salary as well. Your salary also makes sure you keep showing up for work. From the employer’s perspective it makes no difference. Health insurance premiums spent on you don’t result in a durable capital asset the employer can then use or sell. The only reason employers pay $1,000 in premiums versus $1,000 in salary is that it’s more tax advantaged for the employer (and, now, the ACA makes them do it).

The “distortion” comes from excluding benefits from compensation. It makes it impossible to determine what you’re actually measuring—the share of total income going to employees, or rising costs in one particular sector (that the employer has nothing to do with).

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Re:The U.S. Labor Market Isn’t All That Healthy by quxbar on Monday July 08, 2019 @02:28PM (#20385369)

If they only paid my rent in company-owned housing, it would be pretty strange for me to say my employer pays for me house, no strings attached.

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Re:The U.S. Labor Market Isn’t All That Healthy by rayiner on Monday July 08, 2019 @02:55PM (#20385636)

But it’s not company owned housing (the premiums they pay to the insurance company is cash out; they don’t get any part of it back as they would if the insurance company were company owned).

And compensation doesn’t have to be “no strings attached” to count as compensation, especially if it is something you were going to buy anyway. With limited exceptions (e.g. live-in nannies), employer-paid housing is taxable as compensation.

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Re:The U.S. Labor Market Isn’t All That Healthy by nostrademons on Monday July 08, 2019 @03:50PM (#20386126)

There's an element of control that other posters are getting at here. One of the fundamental tenets of a market economy is that consumers get to make decisions on their own behalf when it comes to how they spend their money. If they're not making the decisions, is it actually theirs? There's a pretty big principal-agent problem as soon as you start saying "Well, that money is being spent on your behalf, therefore it's yours." (Ironically, the same problem occurs on the other side of the political aisle with single-payer, government funded health care.)

This is also related to the point you made about possible structural problems with the health care and education industries. Maybe if the consumer could actually choose their health insurer and provider, and there were no exclusive contracts between those two sides of the market, and no barriers to entry for starting a new insurer (and none other than necessary medical licensing of employees for starting a new provider), and providers were required to provide transparent information about pricing and outcomes, healthcare wouldn't be such a clusterfuck of an industry. These are all basic prerequisites for a functioning market, but none of them are present in health care.

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