Then, I get so sick of going to 6-hour interviews where you go with each member of the team one-on-one. Then wait weeks, get a call back to come in again... Take more time off the current job, lie to your boss again... Spend an hour each time figuring out how to get there and park, and find your way around the completely unmarked campus... Then half the people apologize that they forgot you were coming. Study before hand, writing cover letters, tweaking the resume for each job... I get sick of answering the same questions over and over, when we could have just had a group interview and gotten it over with.
And if you're quitting because you're stressed and burnt out, last thing you want is another thing on your plate to be stressed and burnt out about.
Who would lobby for changing that balance and who would finance the campaigns of politicians that support such a reform?
IMO getting rid of the tax subsidy for employer sponsored insurance, enforcing anti-trust law on health providers (insurance, hospitals, etc.) by forcing them to disclose prices and getting rid of onerous licensing regulations will achieve the intended decoupling between health insurance and employment.
However, you need to pass laws for all that.
This is a great reminder of the root issues we need to deal with.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...
Money in politics flows to candidates who already agree with those who control the money. It doesn't go to change the minds of those who disagree.
Obamacare has twisted some of the incentives of actually working, though. Many of us in groups like /r/financialindependence have calculated that it is now to our advantage to eventually quit work altogether, structure our investments and distributions to ensure we are right below the line where subsidies (from those who continue to work) will pay our way, while we just exit the game itself.
It will do nothing but screw those who continue to work themselves ragged as they are now subsidizing many people, like my possible future self, who have many dollars hoarded away, but refuse to be forced to work for everyone else any longer without the extra renumeration that is now sucked out by the government. And this is one of the problems with socialism.
If things move to a single payer social system under a Warren or Sanders presidency, I'd probably quit my job tomorrow. Those who continue to play the game will be working more and more for less and less.
(This is also why UBI won't ever get off the ground; voters aren't stupid. All that money has got to come from somewhere.)
Replacing a system designed to extract as much as possible from people needing medical help in order to enrich corporations with a system optimized for cost and efficiency.
Insurance is already based on paying for other people’s expenses except that it’s optimized for the profit of the ones running the scheme.
So how do we pay for Medicare for all?
We take 80% of the money, return it to the payers, and pay with the rest, in the form of taxes.
I wouldn’t mind a slight increase in taxes in exchange of knowing that I and nobody else has to ever be afraid to go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.
Ambulance rides don’t need to cost $3000, or a night at the hospital $1000.
Once we have one huge entity to negotiate pricing for everyone (about the only thing insurance companies have going on for them), we won’t have to be paying 10x to 100x what the services cost to provide.
Or should we continue sacrificing human lives and health to the altar of quarterly profits for a handful of people?
Healthcare is a solved problem in all first world countries. Trying to spin it into something else is insulting.
People are not stupid and propaganda has its limits.
Not necessarily to be expected, part of the goal of access to healthcare for all is that people can get treatment sooner, before problems get so bad, and get healthier, sooner. Over time if that was effective, medical costs would trend down. America doesn't seem to do that, paying more for the same treatment than other countries, but high healthcare costs are not caused by workers paying them.
But let's say that is expected, healthy people are now paying more to cover the needy. It's a kind of forced charity, and there are good reasons for personally disliking being forced to cover others expenses, sure.
But then your answer to this is to quit your job, and live off your investments? "Making your money work for you" is a polite way of saying "live off the work of others". The dividends and investment growth in that lifestyle come directly from the work done by the still-employed. Your future dream life will send you in the direction of being a shareholder squeezing and extract maximum money from the still-employed, because your survival depends on their work. In a world where everyone saved for financial independence and the pool of workers was ever shrinking, your income would dry up, so the incentives will be upon you to stop the still-employed from doing do what you did - pulling up the ladder after you.
That is, while it won't be outright legislated in a single bill in plain terms like Obamacare was, you will be all-but mandating that other people work to keep you alive, or supporting systems and legislation which has that effect. The very thing you are complaining about, being forced to help others, in your opening paragraph, will still be a system you take part in and support. You're saying "if I am compelled to pay for others, that's evil Socialism" and "if others are working themselves ragged supporting me that's great, self-interest individualism at its best".
screw those who continue to work themselves ragged as they are now subsidizing many people, like my possible future self, [..] while we just exit the game itself.
You aren't exiting the game. You can never exit. The moral answer is to not be the leech you think is so deplorable, and keep working to keep yourself alive. When you can survive on your savings without growth beyond inflation, without dividends, and with spending the principle, then maybe retire. If everyone pitches in, with more people working, there won't need to be screwed over employees working themselves ragged. That ought to benefit society collectively, which will benefit you in roundabout ways.
edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it, to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most would, I think. But the coercion of the current system, and the "safety net" holes in that coercion, would disappear.
Work is an important value. Whatever economic viability the U.S. has to experiment with weird social ideas, it's because of generations of people who believed in work as a moral imperative.
All art adds to our social wealth?
Like anything else, some art does, lots probably doesn't. And how do we decide what is bringing us value? Which art should be promoted and which is just a scam, a big pile of poop put in a mason jar?
We circle right back to capitalism. Giving the populace a mechanism to vote for what has value and what doesn't. Money. Attention. Time. Esteem. Fame.
Something that adds value. That isn't a commodity. That would be hard to copy.
Innovation's biproduct is profit.
Really, the vast majority of profit is from non-innovative friction.
I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.
You're really stupid.
Arguments about how expensive things are make no sense if we restructure our society where money is only half the equation. The labor required to provide food, health, and housing is incredibly small compared to the overall economy.
People want to be useful, and people want more than just a place to live and food to eat.
The real danger would be in creating a system that stifles the free market side of the economy and leaves people stuck in basic assistance hell with no way of working to improve their lives. Worrying about the costs of providing basic assistance to all is actually the least important bit.
I think it'd be nice to have the option to not work, because then people could take risks and pursue things they otherwise couldn't... I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job. However if we could take a lifestyle hit (but still survive) and I could try out some business ideas or other career options that I've been thinking about maybe society as a whole could be better off.
I can't say I've thought this through entirely, but it's certainly an idea that intrigues me.
"I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job" - hello me.
Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?
The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.
Same issue with building houses. The number of people wanting to perform unskilled labor would not come close to approaching the required need for unskilled laborers. For example I dont think anyone wants to be a roofer in the summer heat, the do it only for the paycheck.
Doctors? You are probably right, people will do it for the love of the work. I am very much pro UBI but there are still a ton of supporting things that need to be worked out.
You wind up in a world where freedom vs slavery is a distinction without a difference.
I’d wager the marginal returns from moving beyond feeding yourself for free to feeding a nation are slim, to none, and very likely negative.
For instance, in order to fund CalPers, we need a lot of people to do productive work. That's on a multi-decade timer.
We have a couple of problems - a lot of the things we need most (dedicated time from doctors, teachers, etc.) are affected by Baumol's cost disease and in other categories, like housing, we have legally mandated shortages (it's illegal to create enough homes near transit, amenities, and jobs) so we will, by definition, never have enough.
but also, it takes a long time to find another position.
Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars).
Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as terrible as chattel slavery.