> But if we look at the actual companies targeted, no, GrubHub, Uber, DoorDash et al are NOT low-margin industries. With worldwide services like this where your costs per-unit are basically only server costs, the margins are extremely high because your costs approach zero as users increase.
The dominant unit cost by far is paying the drivers, which doesn't go down with scale. Then you get a bunch of other stuff like credit card processing fees and customer service that also doesn't scale much if any better with volume either.
The server cost is barely a unit cost at all. That's fixed cost. Though it still needs to be paid from something.
> You don't think employees notice when they are paid less? You don't think customers realize when they pay more? If you really want to make the claim that employees don't notice lower pay and customers don't notice higher prices, that's tantamount to admitting that the free market doesn't work.
They notice how much they're paying and being paid, but they lack the information to know how much they would be paying or being paid in the alternative. So they think they're getting "free" insurance when they're really getting insurance instead of a cost of living increase.
> Yes, obviously investors will pass the cost off to employees and customers, but if they pay an unjustifiably high insurance premium and try to pass that cost off, they open up a business opportunity for a competitor to pay employees better and/or charge customers less by buying cheaper insurance and passing off less of that cost.
You're assuming that the problem is caused by which insurance company the employer chooses and not that it is difficult to accurately detect insurance fraud without using invasive methods, so all the insurance companies charge rates that exceed the value of the insurance and the companies only buy it at that price because it's required by law.
> There are additionally some regulations in place that prevent employers from passing off too much of the cost to employees or customers (i.e. minimum wage or fixed taxi fares).
There are two options here. One is that the money comes from somewhere. The other is that it doesn't, the cost of the service now exceeds its value, and you lose your job.
> The advantage that a big company has is that when they shop around for insurance, they're much more likely to be able to get a good price than an individual because they're a large, valuable customer.
Insurance companies compete aggressively on price for all customers. Historically larger buyers had a slight advantage because they could get a discount to account for the lower per-customer acquisition cost of getting many customers at once, but now that insurance is a thing that you buy from a website after comparing prices on the internet, even that is becoming an increasingly negligible advantage.
Meanwhile if you buy it yourself you get to choose the policy that you want rather than whatever your employer stuck you with.