Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately we're forcing a bunch of societal burden onto employers. So you end up with a bunch of admin overhead at the employer to manage all of these additional requirements and maintain all of the admin burden at the regulators to ensure that they are doing their job.

Wouldn't it be better to just tax companies for 1099 like you do unemployment tax and pivot that over to a state-managed healthcare and retirement benefit that 1099's could opt in to for some reasonably low cost?

View on HN

"Ultimately we're forcing a bunch of societal burden onto employers."

How so?

Because the US is shockingly sucktastic wrt health care for it's people. Most wealthy, developed nations provide good health care to its citizens via the government. The US provides health care as a benefit of full-time employee status. Contractor, part-time employees, unemployed people, homemakers and others often get screwed in this deal, which is likely part of why California is saying "You can't call these people contractors anymore."

National health care would resolve a lot of issues that get darkly joked about a la "The third world country of America."

I don't disagree that our healthcare system is a joke. But working full-time for a company in no way, shape or form guarantees that you'll get health benefits too. AB5 also doesn't force employers to provide healthcare.

That doesn't mean the general climate in the US, shaped as it is by our health care policies, didn't help foster the creation of this bill.

Policy and law isn't always rational, well-informed and wise. All too often, it's what you can get most everyone to agree on based on shared assumptions and biases.

I thought ACA fixed that? (As in requiring employers to give some healthcare, even if a horrible one)

I'm surprised why hating on America is fashionable in HN. If this hatred was directed against countries like France or Germany it would be immediately shut down as "nationalist flamewar."

I'd also like to point out that the US has a higher GDP per capita than most European countries and more Europeans immigrate to the US than the reverse. If US is as bad as you say then why does that happen?

USA is rich at the moment since the dollar is extremely strong, its GDP per capita wouldn't look so good if it went down to 2009 levels again.

USA is an attractive emigration target since it is the biggest country which speaks the lingua franca, you see all English speaking countries enjoying similar advantages. This also naturally helps with university prestige and startup success.

The author of the article wouldn’t be a full time employee anyway, so I don’t see why this is such a hardship for SB Nation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com