Something's very wrong when making more money makes you poorer and less healthy.
Yes, what's wrong is cut-off thresholds (or just phaseouts that, when totalled across programs, exceed $1 lost benefits for each $1 of additional income.) It's one of the things motivating UBI, since then all the phaseout happens in one place, by way of progressive marginal tax rates.
It's the same argument to raise minimum wage that'll apply to increasing UBI. I don't see it being the correct avenue to have long-standing progress.
UBI is addressing the root of the issue I pointed to, with healthcare specifically, though, for the same avoiding thresholding reason that UBI serves for aid generally, public baseline healthcare should be universal and not income qualified.
If you make 20k a year, and the cutoff for benefits is 22k, the second you make $22,001 you lose all benefits and are left to fend for yourself.
There should be a better sliding scale to assist those who do want to better themselves without de-incentivizing them to do better because of the fear of losing everything.
It's as if assistance programs were designed to maintain a permanent underclass of dependents.
It all stems from why should I subsidize my neighbors rent?
The problem isn't solved by spreading poverty and dysfunction around rather than concentrating it - it just makes it everyone's (read: your) problem.
There's a whole separate discussion to be had about what taxes should pay for, but I don't think it's abusing the system. I think there's no question the bartender would work full time at a job that paid enough to pay for all of the living expenses and the healthcare, but that's not one of her options. Her options, according to the anecdote, were to work X hours for X money, or to work X + Y hours for X money.
All 3 of my kids are on it. My salary is just under the limit for a household of 5.
I would love to make more money, but it would have to be a raise of about 20% to cover the difference in premium for my kids to be on my private insurance plan. I'm thankful for the program. Without it, I was forking over 20% of my salary to the health insurance company. It seems stupid to allow myself to fall in that margin, no?
15 years ago, we just did without health coverage, but we were young and healthy. Not everyone is as blessed.
1) Don't take the pay rise (career stagnation)
2) Keep health care and advance her career (abusing the system, technically, yes)
3) Keep both jobs and advance her career (lose health care)
You don't need to be an expert on game theory to realise what the best decision to make in this situation is. I agree with you in principle that it shouldn't be right to do this, but the system is, well.. shit. What else could she have done?
Plug in some numbers for yourself with this Obamacare calculator. If you are, for example, a married couple, both 55 years old, you lose many of thousands of dollars of benefits from an additional $1 of income when your income crosses 400% of the poverty line.
To put some real numbers on the table: if this couple made $65800 of income, they get a $1098 per month subsidy. If they made $65900 of income, they get a $0 subsidy.
Any solution to this has to be cooperative between federal/state/local authorities, but given that welfare programs are one of the most politically charged topics in the US, there's little chance that this cooperation will happen.
There was no choice. She couldn't afford to pay for healthcare with the new job. What would you have done?
She's choosing to get healthcare, a reasonable choice, 100% legally. The other poster made it clear she could not afford the jump from medicare to the open market.
If you're worried about the policies I suggest you take a closer look as to who wants to limit how those systems work... time and again it's NOT people pushing "socialist policies".
In the interest of pre-empting one obvious way to interpret that quote, this has a lot to do with the way that social welfare programs tend to be structured, and not necessarily a lot to do with laziness.
To take one concrete anecdote, many years ago a bartender at a neighborhood bar I used to frequent had to quit because she got a promotion at her day job. She didn't want to. She was actually kind of pissed off about it. The problem was, the pay raise pushed her combined income just above the cutoff point for eligibility for the state's Medicaid program, but still got her nowhere near what it would have taken to get health care on the private market. So, in order to advance her career while also retaining access to health care, she had to quit her side gig.