Refusal to recognize the rise of independent contractors is hurting the economy

If you build a business around invalid contracts that's on you or crappy legal advice. Not on the person who signed your predatory contract.

If Uber can't pay real wages and benefits to their employees because they make a margin of $0.19/ride, their business model is pathetic and deserves to be replaced by something more productive and efficient.

Why is that bad, though? The customers (or at least some of them) would go back to taxis, and then either taxi drivers/companies or customers would capture the $.19 that Uber was previously taking. It isn't immediately obvious why that would be worse.

I completely agree that is really independent. And that is what leaves one of the sides completely unprotected. At one side you have Uber that has a big business (that can mean a lot of investors around the glove), lots of money and lots of drivers. It can decide unilaterally to increase/reduce prices as it is better for them. At the other side you have a lot of drivers competing for a small part of the pie. They cannot change anything else than stop working for Uber, and that has a negligible impact on the big company. The only way to compensate for that is for drivers to create an alliance that allows them to actually be able to have negotiation power. And THAT is what the government does with regulations and taxes. They are representing the citizens that want a better quality service, they are representing the citizens that want to drive for Uber and have a fair pay.

Isn't reasonable to let consenting adult citizens to enter into a long term agreement to provide companies, employees and consumers with fair negotiated norms? Why is Uber allowed to bring capital from as many investors as they want while the drivers should not be allowed to organize themselves?

The other difference is that taxi drivers have generally stable work. A guy can drive a cab consistently for years. The pay is not good, but the economics have to work out.

Cab companies and owners have enough wherewithal to make long term decisions, moreover, the 'drivers' - the ones on the end of the chain - if they are not owners - are not responsible for the fixed costs of the cars etc..

Finally, cab companies are by nature, small - and don't have hyper-leverage over drivers. Cab companies have to compete efficiently for talent among their drivers. If you can call it talent.

Uber is a hyper-capitalists dream - you take 105% of the surplus from a market.

The evidence doesn't need to be "super clear." The numbers are pretty solid that universal healthcare is more efficient than the current system the US has. That is, the US government spending alone, on a per capita and GDP basis, is higher than the combined public+private spending in most countries with universal health care. Yet the public+private funding in the US doesn't result in a higher quality of health care, by most measures.

Even sticking to the US, we can get an idea from Medicare and the VA system of the advantages to single payer systems.

Those comparison numbers don't exist for the proposals you mentioned, and there is no reason or experience to suggest they make sense in the current market. (But, consider France's Minitel in the 1980s, when it did make sense.)

Also, the failure costs in health care are much higher than the failure costs in choosing the wrong mobile OS. The worst case for the former is an nation-wide epidemic. The worst case for your company is ... you run out of money and need to get a job.

I once had an ailment that was difficult to diagnose, the doctors at the clinics, used to seeing people for coughs and colds could give a shit. I ended up having to pay a few grand for an American entity operating barely within the bounds of legality in Canada (the Cleveland Clinic). I can assure you that it's a pretty desperate feeling when you are locked out of the system.

Notre Dame Hospital in Montreal is lined with people in beds in the hallways, broken chairs, broken, leaking water fountains in the waiting room, broken / discarded beds in the waiting room - I thought I was in Cuba. The doctor was actually nice but the facilities were crazy. A well run McDonald's has more visible operating efficiency.

It's far from optimal.

> "Can you imagine your entire hospital and insurance system being in blocks of 800 000"

I now live in Sweden, so I'm not unfamiliar with how single payer works in a country of 9 million people. Do note that it's not so isolated as you think. If I were to travel to France, and fall ill, I am entitled to any medical treatment that a resident would receive. This includes Switzerland, so your statement isn't quite a match to how the system works.

And let me say that it's a big relief to not worry about those details anymore. With our first kid on the way, I didn't have to wonder if my insurance would cover everything, or if I was feeding into the cost machine that has caused the price of giving birth to triple over the last 20 years in the US.

> "Successful countries that do it are tiny"

icebraining pointed out the 63 million people living in the UK with its NHS.

Even in the US, there are about 9 million people in the VA system and 55 million people in the Medicare system. Is there some fundamental reason which explains why Medicare cannot scale by a factor of 6?

> "the guy who snuck across the border illegally gets the exact same healthcare as you"

First, in the US everyone, no matter their immigration status, has the right to emergency care. See http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/590328 for how the ethics are clear. So you end up with pregnant women coming to ER to give birth, which is expensive. And you have people coming to ER for things that could have been handled at a clinic more cheaply, and before any complications might have come up.

To make things more complicated, how does this hypothetical border crosser live in the US without a job? Because if he had a job enough to live on, then either the US employer is paying under the table, or he has a falsely acquired SSN and is paying into Medicare, even if he can't use it. The same works for universal healthcare - the money comes from payroll tax/automatic salary deductions, so even if someone snuck across the border, as long as they have a job they are paying for healthcare.

Second, people visiting (say) France from a country outside Europe are not covered under the French system. They are supposed to pay. Indeed, they do pay. Medical tourism is a thing. People will travel to France for treatment, and they pay for the treatment. It is not free to all comers. When my then-girlfriend visited me in Sweden for a couple of weeks, she needed an emergency root canal. She had to pay, and she did, even though she isn't a dutiful Swedish citizen.

But sure, there are people who are in the country but aren't eligible for health care and can't afford to pay or refuse to pay. There are two options 1) treat them, 2) don't treat them and wait until they appear in the ER once the problem gets more serious. (Option 3 is let them die, but I'm not inhumane enough to want that.)

Which is why the following happened in Spain. "Under a reform that came into place in September 2012, foreigners without residency papers lost their national health cards which allowed them free treatment in local public health clinics." Then in 2015, "Spain's conservative government said ... it would restore free healthcare for illegal immigrants, overturning a controversial decision taken three years ago." - https://www.thelocal.es/20150331/spain-to-restore-free-healt...

And they did it to take the load off of expensive ER care, which even the non-single-payer US does.

Then in school we learned more about food during health class. Those who wanted to learn more could take home economics. Also, many people purchased magazines to help understand and select clothing styles, participated in discussions on the topic, and spent a lot of time at stores evaluating the different options (i.e, "hanging out at the mall").

Even for housing, I did it in steps, with college dorm, then shared apartments, to shared houses, to my own apartment, to my own house.

By comparison, when I started my company, I had no corresponding practice or experience in selecting health care or retirement options.

Just like I had no practice in reading NDAs and consulting contracts, or setting up a company. But those are remarkably stable. A NoLo book on consulting and the advice of a friend who started a company a couple of years previous was enough. Then hire a CPA who has a legal obligation to work in my best interests.

An insurance agent does not have the same obligation. I also don't have the experience to judge between the offerings from the different companies, nor experience in the local hospitals or clinics to know who is in which system or what I should be watching out for.

That's straight 'paradox of choice', making it all the more difficult to figure out what to do.

It didn't help that every few months I would get a message that the health insurance rates were increasing, making my wonder if I had made a mistake and was being screwed over by the insurance company, who knows that most small business owners really don't want to deal with re-evaluating the insurance market all the time.

There is a great need to simplify regulations, but until the political system is reformed it will be hard to prevent the political class conspiring with vested interests to create regulations. Fix the cause not the symptoms.

I'm not particularly in favor of a president whose goal is to "burn it all down" in the way the Libertarians want to, but executive power is wide reaching and almost unfettered and there is a whole hell of a lot a president can do.