Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to forget that there are collective action goals that go beyond better wages and more benefits. If you believe that corporations exert disproportionate control over policy in the US, collective action is a way to make that control more responsive to citizens.

View on HN

Yes! IIRC unions provide campaign funding roughly equivalent to the (very right wing) Chamber of Commerce. Unions support liberal think tanks, which develop progressive policies and support the next generation of progressive journalists and policy analysts. More than money, they provide coordination. It's easy for 100 rich dudes to get together and drive policy. It's hard for 200 million working people. That's what a labor movement is for.

Remember that time labor unions lobbied for tax incentives to encourage employer provided health insurance that resulted in the disaster of a system we have today?

Are you sure the employer provided health insurance is a notable cause of the disaster of the current system?

Not letting individuals deduct it directly created the system that removed health insurance from the consumer market, which removed health care from the market, which created the meteoric rise in costs.

Anytime people are removed from the cost of a thing, the price goes up. Housing, education, healthcare. Even buying groceries people spend more than twice as much with a credit card vs cash.

Many countries which provide socialized healthcare do it for much, much cheaper than we do, even without being based on a market.

If removing something from the market led directly to massively inflated costs, we'd expect those systems to be the most expensive, but that's just not true.

In the US it's removed from the market without a price constraint.

Elective services like dermatology and cosmetic have managed to keep prices in line with what people can afford to pay out of pocket.

The other inflators in the US has been emergency room visits for people with no coverage at all, which are 10x more expensive than simply visiting a primary care physician. Plans pushing for funded HSAs would totally eliminate this problem as even the poorest people would have a reason to go where they could get more cost effective care.

> Elective services like dermatology and cosmetic have managed to keep prices in line with what people can afford to pay out of pocket.

I want to mention one very specific thing about this though, these services are very different than other medical services not just because of the difference in insurance markets, but also because unlike many, many procedures they are elective.

The health market is so interesting because one of the normal recourses available to market participants normally, that is doing without, is not available in certain situations int he health market.

Uhh, no, I don't remember that. I remember this:

> The war itself played a major role in the growth of health insurance, according to a March 2002 history of health insurance benefits from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank that examines employment-based benefits. Wages had been frozen by the National War Labor Board amid a shortage of workers as many potential employees went off to fight in the war. Employers sought to get around the wage controls in order to attract scarce workers. Providing them health insurance was one way to do that, EBRI said.

> "During this time, employers petitioned, and were granted to have benefits, particularly health benefits, not be considered part of wages," Stephen Blakely, the director of communications and managing editor at EBRI, told us. "Congress agreed to exempt health insurance benefits from taxation."

http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/oct/30/ja...

> Foreseeing a long and costly political battle, many labor unions chose to campaign for employer-sponsored coverage, which they saw as a less desirable but more achievable goal, and as coverage expanded the national insurance system lost political momentum and ultimately failed to pass.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_Unit...

See History

Did you read the paragraph that came before that? They only chose to campaign for employer-sponsored coverage because they thought that it was more achievable than the single-payer plan proposed by Truman.

Which resulted in the employer driven insurance disaster that exists now...

IIRC employer-based health insurance was a side effect of WW2 price controls. Unions organized support for the PPACA (Obamacare), even though it didn't directly affect their members.

Nobody is saying unions are perfect, but corporations and plutocrats aren't going anywhere, and labor is the only countervailing force.

Well the Labour party in the UK brought in the National Health System in the late 1940s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com