This isn't really the same thing that Walmart is doing at all, they are scheduling people so they never get more than 32 hours a week, not scheduling them based on need for 1.5 hours/week.

There's room for a class of contractors that do small number of hours for many different employers, either many within a quarter or many throughout the year.

One practical alternative would be universal health care.

Within our current system of insanely bad group negotiation for rates, establishing a house cleaning union that could negotiate as a class would probably be the second best alternative.

The third alternative is the Obamacare one, which is to pay your employees at a rate high enough so they can buy their own subsidized insurance on the health exchanges.

>What’s the practical alternative?

Single payer healthcare, not that your question is sincere.

I like how baked into this question is how a practical single-payer solution is not practical due to purely political reasons. (Where your house cleaner's taxes pay into a large risk pool and their healthcare costs are based on their income)

Serious question: isn’t this also what the ACA intended to address? It’s imperfect, but the ACA does provide subsidies for lower-income folks.

Since you have skin in the game: how do you think your house cleaner should get health care?

What do you mean? Aren’t you technically paying a company for said service? Even if that company has one employee, your house cleaner?

> Aren’t you technically paying a company for said service? Even if that company has one employee, your house cleaner?

Plenty of people are hired for work like that without forming a business entity, and sometimes under conditions that qualify as employment rather than contract work.

You're not wrong. But how could this apply to OP's situation? Given a 40 hour work week, three hours every other week is a mere 3.75%.

For the sake of conversation, let's consider the cleaner to be an employee and OP to be the employer. Even then, unless OP has 50 full-time and full-time equivalent employees, there is no requirement for the employer to provide group health insurance, according to the ACA.

I’m not privy to her business arrangements, of course, but we write a check to her as an individual.

Do you provide her with a form 1099 at the end of the year?

Interestingly enough, that’s exactly how it works in France. When you pay your house cleaner you also pay the employment contributions, including pro-rated disability/maternity/retirement

Obviously if she only has one client that’s not going to be a lot, but it stacks with all the other employers

Your house cleaner is a legitimate contractor, with all the freedoms and risks that entails.

You would never be obligated to pay for their health insurance, it would be up to them, or their employer, to figure that out.

Walmart on the other hand has clear employees which are expected to turn up to non-negotiable shifts and wear a Walmart specified shifts. They’re currently forced to take on the risks of a contractors, but with none of the freedoms.

Free healthcare at the point of delivery perhaps?

As long as we don't have free healthcare in the US, yes, you should have to pay for 5% of your house cleaner's health insurance.