I wouldn’t call losing your source of income and maybe your health insurance no practical repercussions.
I don’t know in which countries you worked but I didn’t have any problems getting out of a contract.
I don’t know in which countries you worked but I didn’t have any problems getting out of a contract.
COBRA costs you exactly how much you + your employer were paying for that insurance.
It's expensive because your employer's share of insurance was a significant part of your compensation (And because US healthcare costs are pants-on-head insane.) I'll point out that it's generally quite expensive to, like, stop getting paid.
Practically, post-ACA, health insurance in the US is about as tied to employment as having a roof over your head and food on your table is. If you don't have employment, or money, you're going to be in trouble - but that's the case with everything you need to live, not just healthcare.
The "inexplicably" being a commentary on the wisdom/sanity/compassion of linking healthcare to employment, rather than a claim that the parent comment had made an inexplicable leap of logic
> > I have come to the conclusion that the American “at-will” employment model is actually a good thing and benefits workers
It may seem like you can just walk away from a job but realistically most people can't.
Then of course, being unemployed, you have the option of COBRA (you probably don't want that though), and if it does not make you immediately eligible for Medicaid in your state (40 of 50 have Medicaid expansion), it would make you eligible for the ACA subsidized plans. NB: more than one-third of employer-sponsored plans are HDHPs, meaning employees have deductibles in the thousands of dollars anyway.
It's certainly a disruption, and it's one more thing to consider, but the idea that "most Americans" are one job loss away from being killed by lack of health care is not remotely true - most people don't need health care that regularly, unemployed people have insurance options, and at a last resort, for the most part, you can accrue unlimited medical debt in most places with few real-world consequences.
For most women of child bearing age, between birth control and annual visits, healthcare is pretty important.
Annual visits are also not actually that important. They’re perfunctory. They can certainly be put off for a few months in a ok except a few one in a million cases.
And at any rate, as I said, losing your job in the US means your insurance is disrupted, not that you are now uninsured. Pregnancy even in states without Medicaid expansion will get the mother and child on Medicaid.
Of course, at the risk of being silly, it’s also true that missing a day of birth control is not what got your wife pregnant. ;) it’s pretty surprising to me how many people (now with children) thought birth control meant they wouldn’t get pregnant. There definitely needs to be better education on this. Taking birth control, even regularly, even with an IUD, is more like a backstop and should not be relied on for your primary protection. The odds are low but when you play them a few times a week for ten years…
(The system might work if some lag was introduced (a year of keeping that level of insurance??), but I'm not sure that this duration would not quickly get sapped by perverse incentives ?)
The origin of the practice was in WW2, when Roosevelt froze wages. To attract more and better employees, the companies threw in health insurance as a way around the restrictions.
Stop linking medical insurance to employment via this tax bigotry. Buy it on the open market instead, or subsidize it if you're a leftist, but don't put that burden on jobs, you'll only get fewer jobs with greater hassle. People can agree to the arrangements they prefer, and it's not for us to second guess that. If there are people who end up coming up short, then you can help them yourself, or force the whole society to chip in (again, if you're a leftist), but don't force such considerations on the fragile links among private individuals and businesses.
It would be very easy to reverse, if literally anyone was willing to.
Changing the tax deduction status would harm businesses, and therefore I can't see a conservative administration ever letting that fly.
There's no reason why a law cannot be passed amending the tax code to make health insurance premiums paid by an individual tax deductible.
I'm not saying it would be easy to get such a law passed, but that doesn't change the fact that it's stupid to have health insurance tied to your employer.
(At any rate, health insurance premiums are tax deductible, but the rules are annoying and require that your healthcare spending be a certain percentage of your income.)
While getting terminated is disruptive, it isn’t the end of the world for the typical American. The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice. It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.
I have seen the “having a contract” thing abused many times in many countries in Europe. Thanks, but no thanks. I have had that contract multiple times and I don’t want that contract. That safety blanket comes with heavy chains. I’ve seen those contracts used to stifle far too many employees to condone it, employees deserve better.
This question isn’t relevant to the claim that I am responding to.
> Losing the income is a consequence, but it's the same consequence in both cases and so is not part of the conversation
You’re right that having no income is the same as having no income, and the manner in which it was lost does not matter. But the state of “having no income” does indeed matter. That statement is relevant to this conversation due to gp’s claim that losing income and health insurance are not “practical repercussions” of losing employment. That’s a naïveté that a stable society cannot abide.
I believe it’s the case that in some places, bureaucrats can basically just say “no” if you decide to lay people off. Why would you want to hire people in the first place if there were a risk of that happening, especially if you have the option to hire people in a different country?
It goes both ways: during that time, the employee too can quit with a reduced mandatory notice.
That only covers the "if that person ends up sucking" part though.
For the other "business falling apart", maybe they consider it’s part of the business owner’s responsibility to make sound business decisions when involving someone else’s livelihood. Just like when leasing a shop or taking on a loan.
What about running a tech startup with high chance of failure? Ever considered why they seem to be few and far between in EU?
That and other reasons (few vacantion days, request to overtime, etc) is why one should avoid American companies in Europe, if possible.
Trust goes both ways.
As an aging guy, I'm also staring down the barrel of cross-party consensus on replicating the predatory US healthcare model in my country. I see what things look like in the States, and no thanks.
> While getting terminated is disruptive, it isn’t the end of the world for the typical American.
Whenever conversations like this come up, I feel the need to remind folks that most folks don't work in tech for colossal salaries. Around a quarter of Americans have less than USD 1,000 saved, most under 5,000.[0] No runway is the norm, I'd put that well above "disruptive" for "most Americans".
[^0] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/average-ameri...
It costs loads more to be poor than to have some money. You won't save money by buying up-front, if your credit is low you'll pay more than a person with more money, you miss payments and the late fees rack up, you overdraft and your fees add up, you can't go on autopay to save money because you risk going into overdraft, etc.
Maybe if the 1% didn't own 50% off all the resources (money) than poor people could find some money to save.
For now.
> The relative ease with which most people can get another job is also nice.
This seems unemphathetic. Even just for the tech industry, thousands of engineers have found it difficult to find new work after the layoffs of the previous years. Please do not extrapolate your experience of the ease of finding new work towards every other American.
> It is an economy that is structured under the assumption that people will move between jobs and minimizes the friction in doing so.
No. Even if you look at it from a process perspective, true minimized friction is when other countries goverments automatically deduct and manage your taxes when you move jobs, manage retirement funds and have socialized healthcare to reduce the stress and uncertainty during unemployment. You claim that "at-will" minimizes friction is a joke compared to those.