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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

It's rare for a company to offer health insurance to employees who are pegged to minimum wage.

If salaries are going down due to inflation, then you may have a point but it's a perverse one; medical costs are going up way faster than anything else.

Both are reasons to support socialized medical coverage, but they don't really enter into this particular line of discussion.

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If medical costs increase more than the amount of general inflation's effect on both medical costs and the rest of wages, than covering those increasing costs while holding the rest of wages constant is a wage increase.

If you don't like that, it's a social issue and a policy question, but it's not evidence what wage (how much employer is paying for employee benefits) is stagnant or droppiing.

If the workers aren't getting it in their paycheck it is not a wage increase. It is simply another tax, neither the employer nor the employee benefit from it so who exactly is this benefit for?

Worse, it’s a regressive tax.

Yup. You can't eat your medical insurance, nor can you live in it.

Truthfully I agree but I'd argue this seems more like a reason to decouple healthcare from employment entirely. Such as with socialized medical coverage like you suggest.

Large US Companies are incentivized to keep healthcare something they solely provide because it ties their employee's health coverage to their employment status, putting pressure on them to keep their job or face paying their hospital bills in full.

Which in almost any other conversation would be called extortion.

It really shows you whose interests a politician is working to advance when they state how much Americans love their private extortion plans.

And yet people go and vote for them with hopes that some random real estate billionaire will bring prosperity to their homes. The entire thing would collapse after first election if people would vote with brains instead of feelings.

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