Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by jsjsbdkj on Sunday July 25, 2021 @11:54AM
(#27950077)
Benefits only work if there's a large population where the risks can be averaged out. If you let people pick and choose whether they want insurance, people with known health problems will overwhelmingly want insurance, and the price will be driven up. Really this shouldn't be dealt with at the employer level but by the government - there's a net public good to everyone having guaranteed healthcare, because preventative care avoids larger emergency expenses and allows for more efficient allocation of resources. But instead you get this hyper-individualism where people want to opt into the social contract piecemeal at the time it benefits them, and opt out when it doesn't.
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by josephcsible on Sunday July 25, 2021 @12:00PM
(#27950131)
I 100% agree that adverse selection is a problem, but the government's rule doesn't really fix it. All that happened is that people with known health problems will look harder for full-time jobs, and healthier people will take the part-time jobs that pay slightly more per hour.
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by katbyte on Sunday July 25, 2021 @12:38PM
(#27950557)
? If healthcare/benefits is provided by the government from taxes outside of your job then it doesn’t matter if you have a full/part time job?
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by josephcsible on Sunday July 25, 2021 @03:13PM
(#27952016)
> If healthcare/benefits is provided by the government from taxes outside of your job
But that's not the case today in the US. My point is that the government mandating that full-time jobs provide benefits (which is the case today in the US) doesn't fix the adverse selection problem. All it does is lead to a bunch of jobs right under the cutoff for full-time.
Re:Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
by salawat on Sunday July 25, 2021 @01:37PM
(#27951192)
The issue there is that that if you divest the employer from the consequences of working conditions, the individual is left carrying the bag.
If as an employer you just can't get a break on the rates it costs to insure you, that's a really strong signal you have something wrong. Doing it through the government in theory gives people freedom of moving from employer to employer, but I guarantee you there is some juju that needs characterization in wresting some of the incentive shaping powers of insurers and vesting them in Government.
Suppose the benefits cost the company the equivalent of $3/hour. Then at the same cost they can either offer a job that pays $15/hour without benefits or a job that pays $12/hour with benefits. They're not idiots; they're going to offer the one that best allows them hire and retain workers.
That it happens to be the one with the higher pay should be telling us something -- that some workers value the money over the benefits.
Which makes a lot of sense. Many people have a family health plan from their spouse's job. They may value the flexibility of choosing when to take unpaid time off instead of working for $12/hour with paid time off, which is a monetary loss equivalent to more than 10 weeks of unpaid time off when working at $15/hour instead. They simply get less from the benefits than they get from being paid the money it costs the employer to provide them.
Stop requiring employers to provide "benefits" that many employees don't want and people wouldn't have to voluntarily work around it like this, at the cost of being unable to work 40 hours a week even if you want to.