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Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

As an Americam, I'm free to move about, but I don't move jobs very often. I consider healthcare benefits when I move, but only that I have them and that my new salary pays for them completely. If the new employer pays a smaller percentage of my healthcare bill, then my salary must increase by that amount. I've never switched jobs and had my overall salary decrease.

I wouldn't stay in a bad job for the benefits, but I'm a technical employee, who happens to have lots of choice.

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I have had to choose between working at a fast food restaurant (crappy job) and working as a math tutor (awesome job), but the tutoring gig was a contract deal and as such they were not required to provide any health benefits. Working as a tutor for a couple months was really great, but in the end I had to go back to working fast food so that I can pay for medications and a surgical procedure. Yay Capitalism!

So on the topic of healthcare linked to employment, what would it have looked like if you took some of the tutor money and bought your own healthcare?

I want to say that maybe the fast food job simply paid more if you factored in the healthcare, but maybe it's that the fast food company can get way better insurance rates than you alone?

You are right, it comes down to the bargaining power of large corporations. The hourly rate of the tutoring gig was higher, but I would also have been paying a lot more for insurance, so it would even out. I also have to take brain medications which complicates things, because a lot of insurance plans don't provide good mental health care coverage, adding a layer of complexity to my decision making process.

For example, even if plan A and plan B cost the same amount out of my pocket, but Plan B does not cover my medications until after a $5,000 deductable, it really isn't helping me because all of my medications added up over a year come to just under $5,000.

There are so many layers of bureaucracy and complexity and institutional inertia keeping this exploitative system moving, it really needs to just be burnt to the ground so we can start fresh.

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