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When has any neoliberal policy actually benefited the poor?

All the time. Only it's the poor of other countries, not our own.

True

People can also buy health care plans directly through the exchange and use essentially a pre paid tax credit to directly pay part of their premiums. For example the monthly premium for a couple may be $1000 but the cost to the customer could be $300. At the income point just beyond medicaid eligibility this will virtually always be cheaper than what your employer offers.

29 hours a week is about 130 hours a month. Assuming a wage of $15 an hour, that's $1950. Spending $300 of that, about 15% of your pre-tax income, on health insurance is a decision few people would be happy about.

No one is happy with the American Healthcare System unless you have America's exclusive socialized Healthcare, Tricare. You're also calculating it off of part time hours.

For foreigners or Americans without much exposure to the armed forces, and to save you a search: Tricare is what members of our military receive, active duty and (IIRC) those on full retirement.

However, depending on how you define "socialized", lots of people are covered under several "socialized" programs by the US government, not just Tricare. Medicare (old or disabled people), Medicaid (the very poor), CHIP and things like that (poor kids). Also, if you're counting Tricare, probably any health insurance provided by any level of US government (federal, state, county, city) to government workers should count.

In the end, the US government pays for healthcare (or, at least, much of it—US prices for healthcare are very high, and the way our insurance works means that insurance is just part of how the bills get paid, though a large part) for an high percentage of our population, one way or another.

IF you've never heard anyone complain about Tricare, you don't know anyone on it.

Over 80% of my family is and was in the forces. They were all on Tricare, and complained. The ones that transitioned out now have to deal with private insurance and, in retrospect, Tricare was a teddy bear compared to what they are dealing with now.

I'm calculating it on part time hours because that's what this thread is about - how employers keep people as part time in order to avoid giving them health care benefits.

Isn't that what your employer would pay on health insurance in any case?

Speaking as a French person, 15% of my pre-income-tax salary sounds close to what I pay for state-sponsored healthcare (I pay more than that, but it includes retirement contributions and stuff).

Isn't that what your employer would pay on health insurance in any case?

In the case of the UK where I live, approximately 20% of all government spending goes on healthcare. Taxes on businesses, retail sales, house sales, wealth, capital gains, etc all contribute to the cost of healthcare, not just income taxes. That means a lot less than 15% of anyone's individual tax is spent on it.

the trick, of course, is that your 15% gets you /healthcare/, while our 15% gets us a /healthcare-related financial product/, which will require even more money should we ever use it.

Is the tax to be paid on that income significant?

What’s the practical alternative? Should I have to buy my house cleaner (3 hours every other week) health care?

What do you mean? Aren’t you technically paying a company for said service? Even if that company has one employee, your house cleaner?

> Aren’t you technically paying a company for said service? Even if that company has one employee, your house cleaner?

Plenty of people are hired for work like that without forming a business entity, and sometimes under conditions that qualify as employment rather than contract work.

You're not wrong. But how could this apply to OP's situation? Given a 40 hour work week, three hours every other week is a mere 3.75%.

For the sake of conversation, let's consider the cleaner to be an employee and OP to be the employer. Even then, unless OP has 50 full-time and full-time equivalent employees, there is no requirement for the employer to provide group health insurance, according to the ACA.

I’m not privy to her business arrangements, of course, but we write a check to her as an individual.

Do you provide her with a form 1099 at the end of the year?

I like how baked into this question is how a practical single-payer solution is not practical due to purely political reasons. (Where your house cleaner's taxes pay into a large risk pool and their healthcare costs are based on their income)

Serious question: isn’t this also what the ACA intended to address? It’s imperfect, but the ACA does provide subsidies for lower-income folks.

>What’s the practical alternative?

Single payer healthcare, not that your question is sincere.

This isn't really the same thing that Walmart is doing at all, they are scheduling people so they never get more than 32 hours a week, not scheduling them based on need for 1.5 hours/week.

There's room for a class of contractors that do small number of hours for many different employers, either many within a quarter or many throughout the year.

One practical alternative would be universal health care.

Within our current system of insanely bad group negotiation for rates, establishing a house cleaning union that could negotiate as a class would probably be the second best alternative.

The third alternative is the Obamacare one, which is to pay your employees at a rate high enough so they can buy their own subsidized insurance on the health exchanges.

Since you have skin in the game: how do you think your house cleaner should get health care?

Free healthcare at the point of delivery perhaps?

Interestingly enough, that’s exactly how it works in France. When you pay your house cleaner you also pay the employment contributions, including pro-rated disability/maternity/retirement

Obviously if she only has one client that’s not going to be a lot, but it stacks with all the other employers

Your house cleaner is a legitimate contractor, with all the freedoms and risks that entails.

You would never be obligated to pay for their health insurance, it would be up to them, or their employer, to figure that out.

Walmart on the other hand has clear employees which are expected to turn up to non-negotiable shifts and wear a Walmart specified shifts. They’re currently forced to take on the risks of a contractors, but with none of the freedoms.

As long as we don't have free healthcare in the US, yes, you should have to pay for 5% of your house cleaner's health insurance.

Obama tried. The Affordable Care Act barely passed. He had to make last-minute compromises with members of his own party to get it voted through at all.

It’s not a loophole in the sense that it’s an unintentional exploit. Everyone involved knew full-well what the point of that provision was. If Congress voted in something more stringent, their corporate donors (e.g., Walmart) would have been pissed. That’s a deal-breaker for most Congress-critters.

Probably one of the numerous compromises made just to get the bill to pass at all.

The much more famous one probably being Liberman single-handedly killing the idea of the government directly providing insurance even if it is in fair competition, and then with Scott Brown briefly being elected in MA (which had Romney-care anyway and the ACA barely impacted most of us) everyone assumed it was a referendum on the ACA and was too scared to push any further.

It was very distressing watching the news spin it all as being about the ACA when it was definitely much more about his opponent since everyone here already had something analogous to the ACA. But that's how spin works I guess, it's certainly even worse now.

Because you can imagine the incentives if a company had to pay for health insurance for a part-time worker who works 10 hr per week?

All those part time jobs would disappear since what kind of employer pay $5-10k per year in insurance premium for an employee who earns $600 per month before taxes?

And you might say “great! Who cares about part time work?” and you’d be wrong, plenty of people don’t need or can do full time work.

Wouldn’t a sliding scale make the most sense?

Hard to make a sliding scale work when the scale is "the less you work, the less money you make, the more you pay for insurance."