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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Stuff like this reminds me that politics is inescapable. Why? Because living in the US, my health care is tied to my employer, so no matter how desirable this kind of work might look to me, I'm not going to do it, because while I can tolerate instability in work (developers are lucky to be able to get a job very easily) I will not tolerate instability in my family's health coverage.

For a few years there it really looked like the US was going to go in the right direction, but alas. And this ought to be a totally off-topic rant, but when you tie employment with other statuses like the US does, you can't ignore it.

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> Because living in the US, my health care is tied to my employer

This is rather an argument against the fact that health care is tied to the employer (which I agree it should not) and not against the pop-up employer.

I think that was their point; with healthcare tied to the employer, going to a pop-up employer is way riskier since it means you'll not only be gambling on your economic stability once the project is done, but the ability for you to get healthcare.

> I think that was their point; with healthcare tied to the employer, going to a pop-up employer is way riskier since it means you'll not only be gambling on your economic stability once the project is done, but the ability for you to get healthcare.

Which is exactly, as a pointed out, an argument against the fact that health care is tied to the employer, but not against the pop-up employer per se.

Yes, but it's a technicality. For all intents and purposes it is an argument against pop-up employers if that form of employment means having worse health care coverage, or none at all (I'm not based in the US, so not entirely sure how it works). Ensuring the same health care coverage invalidates the argument, but that's not today's reality as I understood it.

If the pay is lucrative enough, you could just buy your own health insurance. You probably already are notionally adding the cost of private health insurance into your understanding of your salary, just to have a more accurate representation of your benefits package.

You can, but from my understanding the math is not equivalent - employer-subsidised healthcare is cheaper even when you factor everything in, because they benefit from group-buying discounts.

So yes, if lucrative enough. But that's quite the qualifier, especially when you won't have a reliable income.

> You can, but from my understanding the math is not equivalent - employer-subsidised healthcare is cheaper even when you factor everything in, because they benefit from group-buying discounts.

Well, that's partially correct. True for General Electric, but companies with 500-1,000 employees don't really have a pull. Remember that insurance is also bought by state, so only employers heavily concentrated in one state get those.

The biggie on the employer side is tax deductibility. US taxpayers generously subsidize the cost of employer-purchased health plans but not the cost of individual-purchased health plans.

As an individual you can tweak the situation in your favor (figure out if your doctor or dentist belongs to an HMO, join an HMO instead of PPO/EPO plan, buy a bronze plan when you're young and single, upgrade to gold or platinum when you're older or have kids), but the massive corporate subsidy still means that someone working for a corporation and receiving exact same benefit would be paying less.

Sounds like a case for unions or some other professional association where workers can band together into common insurance pools.

The ability to negotiate healthcare benefits as a group is indeed a popular justification for unions in fields not historically associated with union labor. Freelancers Union is an example, in addition to others mentioned up-thread. https://www.freelancersunion.org/benefits/

Circling back to the inescapability of politics.

You can never buy a policy as cheap or good as a mid or large group policy. You always pay more for shitty benefits, although Obamacare made it better.

Also, many big employers self insure and cut out the risk premiums. My current (large) employer offers an old school PPO with high copay but generous coverage including infertility, prosthetic and devices, etc for a total cost less than an Obamacare gold plan.

Individual coverage is crappier than group coverage, especially if many of the ACA reforms get rolled back as the GOP wants to do. Pre-existing conditions, yearly and lifetime caps, etc.

1. Buy a computer with internet access

2. Subscribe to America Online

3. Navigate to www.healthcare.gov

4. Sign up for a health plan, paying likely more than your employer pays for you, but likely much less than the self employment premium

* Even the current republican plan wouldn't really change this, and even if so, it wouldn't change for like 4 more years.

* There are pricing and plan challenges every year are real, due to the incentive system being insane (and sick people being expensive.) Depending on where you live, it may be tough to predict what plans will be available next year.

So what you're saying is that my healthcare plan will be more expensive and is guaranteed for a year at most, and maybe less if Republicans get their way?

Yeah, I'm not doing that.

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