40 hours according to the California Department of Industrial Relations and 30 hours according to the Affordable Care Act.
> The right question is -- why is this forced onto Uber rather than being a question of national healthcare.
It's not just healthcare. It's also about unemployment insurance, paid time off, 401k contributions/matching, how the tax burden is split, and on and on.
So uber can avoid this requirement by only allowing drivers to work for 40/30 hours per week?
Because one political party has spent the last 4 decades fighting to prevent "national healthcare," forcing states and businesses to deal with it.
Hell, they've spent the last 10 years trying to demolish a law that the overwhelming majority of voters support, including those within their own party.
However, as currently envisioned, the single-payer system would not charge employers; it would be part of the taxes levied on all taxpayers (including employers), which would spread out the costs more.
CA could fix it’s own health system to cover everyone. Yes, there are federal rules they’d need to work around, but they could do it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/business/economy/californ...
Basically, one someone tallied up the cost, it ran out of steam. Just like in VT.
Do you feel strongly that one more tax would solve all of California's problems?
For example on a household income of $100,000 with members married filing jointly, California effective state income tax rate is about 3%, or in this case $3,000.
Moving to a zero state income tax state like Washington or Texas will only save you that much in state taxes but will probably save you a huge amount more in lower housing costs - for a common single-family home perhaps on the order of 20 to $30,000 a year.
If you want to place blame anywhere, place it on restrictive zoning laws that limit the construction of new housing, and on proposition 13 which has disincentivized the building of residential real estate in favor of commercial, and allowed untold numbers of properties to multiply and value over the decades without paying anything near an equivalent increase in property taxes.
The reason your kids cant buy a house down the street from yours has nothing to do with how much taxes your kids pay and everything to do with the policies that you've voted for over a lifetime of homeownership that have insured way less supply than demand.
These people _love_ to talk about how much more their houses are worth at dinner parties everytime you see them and then are all surprised pikachu face when they've priced out their own kids.
Housing can be affordable or an investment, but not both.
With specific respect to the tax issue, the flipside of "one more tax" to pay for a single-payer system is that it would replace health insurance premiums. Because premiums are currently set for smaller risk sharing pools than a statewide pool of nearly 40 million, and those premiums must also include significant profit margins to pay for health executive's multimillion dollar annual bonuses, it would be very easy for a single-payer tax levy to undercut premiums by more than 50% (and for the single-payer proposals currently under consideration, the employee savings range from 50-90%).
If anything, the problem with a tax for a single-payer health system is that people would be saving so much money compared to paying health insurance premiums that CA would have too many people moving into the state for the rest of our public services to handle.
Ha! Yeah, CA is known for it’s multitude of far-right groups.
And if they are so far right, why are they leaving and voting for left wing policies in other states?
Suffice to say CA has some of the highest taxes of any state, yet it also has some of the worst social problems - poverty, homelessness, etc.
I’d say it CA inability to run a tight ship despite all the taxes that is causing people to leave.
I was under the impression that much of the homelessness problem is because CA is a nice place to live (with or without a home) and because the climate is temperate and thus safer to live than most other places (where a homeless person could literally freeze to death.)
Sorry if this sounds insensitive -- I really want to understand this: I concede that cost of housing could lead to homelessness, but I dont understand this -- isnt the housing cost really a problem just in the two major metro areas? Is housing exorbitant once you leave those areas? For someone who is homeless, is there any gravity anymore to -- say -- being close to SF/SV/Hollywood?
LA Times' Steve Lopez interviewed a number of homeless last year in a series of articles. Most of them weren't from LA. They just came because they were told the weather was great and that drugs in LA were free.
A number of far right groups can trace their origins to the Inland Empire or to CA's far North.
As for the homeless issues: multiple states admit that they use CA as their dumping grounds for their homeless. It was, and still is, the unofficial policy of the state of Texas to buy their homeless tickets to LA. (Former TX governor Rick Perry used to openly brag about this, including when he was running for president.) A recent survey conducted by the LA Times last year found that more than half of LA's homeless aren't even from California. They just came here because authorities back home suggested that they would enjoy CA more. Excluding the non-local homeless, LA would have enough beds to house its own homeless. We just don't have enough to house the entire country's homeless as well.
I keep hearing that most of the homeless in SF are actually from SF.
As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco. This figure is up from 61% in 2013.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
A broader solution would not be one-more-tax, it would be net-zero. The current proposal is also a tax -- it forces a cost on Uber (which will be passed onto customers) to solve the problem on a micro level. Whether I pay an "Uber regulatory recovery fee" or some other tax is all net zero. But I'd love to see a broader solution that solves the problem more universally (if not at the federal level, then at least at the state level).
Let me anecdotally tell you that a large healthcare program has not been good in my experience. Single Payer maybe good though so long as there is choice and competition.
Another consideration is that the US has been setup to allow a sort of localism where states can design their own solutions. It might be best for each system to be setup as a state level item.
Look at the NHS in the UK, on average it costs £3k per person per year, outcomes are broadly similar (if not better, especially in areas like post-partum mortality) and as a % of GDP is half as expensive as US healthcare.
There's many good reasons to avoid nationalized healthcare. Have you been to the post office or the DMV?
Yes, I have. The post office seems to do an EXCELLENT job of delivering mail at an absurdly low price (for standard letters or postcards), although when I lived in Chicago for a few years I found that a certain portion of letters were never delivered.
A number of years ago the DMV (I was in New York and New Jersey at the time) offered terrible customer service; these days the DMV I have gone to (New Jersey and Pennsylvania) seem to do an excellent job.
What I can conclude from this is that quality varies, whether in private industry or public services.
It's a public-private healthcare system in which a single entity pays all healthcare providers for health services rendered.
Individual providers would still be free to negotiate their own rates with the single-payer entity.
Individual providers would still be free to provide concierge medical services or other non-covered medical services (for example, most plastic surgery).
Individual providers would still be free to distinguish themselves on the basis of patient service.
And with all due respect, the problem with the post office is that the GOP requires it to pay for decades of upfront expenses now rather than when those expenses are incurred, unlike a private business, and the GOP won't actually let the post office operate anything like a private business. If the post office could operate like a private company it would shut down every rural post office in America, since those are just money drains that detract from the profitable urban and suburban facilities. If the post office could operate like a government agency again (like it did before Reagan), it would run as smooth as butter.
The Tea Party predates the ACA and was more a general anti-Obama movement than specifically motivated by one policy.
Have I been to the post office or the DMV? Sure. And when there are a ton of people who want to use a service, you tend to have to wait.
Have YOU been to a for-profit emergency room? Or a for-profit, non-fast-food restaurant? Hell, go to a Fed Ex or UPS store. They won't be perfect, and you will wait in line.
And for their competitor.
Dara Khosrowshahi is right that there needs to be a "third way." Uber would obviously prefer contractors, and maybe the "third way" talk is just them realizing that's not politically viable, but however they reached the conclusion, they're right that this is a different category of work.
EDIT: To a reply saying I don’t understand how fast food restaurants operate, I certainly do, I’ve worked fast food in my life. While they certainly try to be flexible, you can’t just decide to show up approximately “whenever you feel like it.” The closest approximation to that is to only have 4 hours a week regularly scheduled (otherwise they can’t call you an employee), and then you call in whenever you feel like working to see if they need help (often they will say “yes” but sometimes they will say “no”). However, this arrangement only works once you have enough experience that you can come in and basically work any position in the restaurant, and it’s not something that can be scaled to every worker at the restaurant.
You actually can take several months off from McDonalds if you want and come back. Many employees do, especially the ones that work at college-town McDs...
Moreover, you can switch shifts at will, so long as you find another employee to exchange shifts with.
Pretty much the difference between fast food and Uber is that fast food is a minimum 8 hour shift and Uber can be as short as a 1 minute ride.
And what happens if you don't log in to Uber or Lyft every day? You'll fall off their internal automated lists for ride selection priority and get stuck with all the undesirable rides nobody else wanted to drive.
> Where is the line of hours driven until you get benefits? I dont know, but I think that is the wrong question.
I wonder if there is a reason it could't work like this:
• If you work N hours in a week for employer X, where N meets the benefit threshold, T, for some type of benefit, the employer has to provide that benefit.
• If N does not meet that threshold, the employer has to make a payment of N/T x C to the State, where C is the weekly cost for the person to pay for that benefit themselves.
• The State keeps track of these payments on a per worker basis and works with the benefit providers to use them as a subsidy on the worker's cost to buy the benefit.
For example, for health insurance, if Bob drove 40 hours a week for Uber, Uber would have to offer Bob the same health insurance they provide their full time employees.
If Bob only drives 10 hours a week for Uber, delivers food for Grubhub 15 hours a week, and does 10 hours waiting tables at a cafe, none of those would have to provide health insurance, because the threshold is 30 hours. But Uber would have to contribue 1/3 C, Grubhub 1/2 C, and the cafe 1/3 C to the State for Bob's health insurance. That would be enough to cover Bob getting health insurance on his state's ACA market.
It would actually be more than enough. If the excess carries over to be used in weeks when Bob works less than 30 hours total, then as long as Bob averages 30 hours of work a week, he has health insurance.
Because that's the way the stupid system currently works?
So it's both- Uber should be forced to work in the current confines of the system, and there should be questions like national healthcare
>If we offered national healthcare, like many other countries, it would solve the problem across the board. It could be funded by Uber and all other companies through some type of tax. That seems a lot more efficient than trying to solve the problem piecemeal.
As others has said, it's not just healthcare.. payroll taxes, other benefits etc.. Uber is basically trying to avoid all of this by pretending that 100% of their workforce are "contractors" even though many work 40+ hours a week like a normal employee.
Where is the line of hours driven until you get benefits? I dont know, but I think that is the wrong question.
The right question is -- why is this forced onto Uber rather than being a question of national healthcare.
If we offered national healthcare, like many other countries, it would solve the problem across the board. It could be funded by Uber and all other companies through some type of tax. That seems a lot more efficient than trying to solve the problem piecemeal.