What It's Like Working for TaskRabbit | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like Working for TaskRabbit

time.com

40 pointsedward16 comments

The NY Times had a much more nuanced story recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/technology/in-the-sharing-...

HN discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8189034

Can you imagine how much growth there would be in this type of work if we had universal healthcare? That's probably the only thing keeping many people chained to a desk.

Product designer @ Stride Health here. We actually work closely with TaskRabbit to help Taskers signup for coverage. Single payer would be pretty awesome but the next best thing is a high functioning individual market and companies that encourage their freelancer population to get signed up for coverage and stay healthy. You can check out the LP we direct Taskers to here: https://taskrabbit.stridehealth.com/launch

With obamacare there really isn't any excuse for not having health insurance.

Obamacare tripled the rates in my state, while not really providing anything over what was provided before.

Nationally, the last time it was reported, the average increase in insurance costs was around 2x.

Obamacare also does not provide coverage for anyone that is near, or makes less, than the poverty line. It simply mandated by pen, rather than by a way, that the states absorb those people on their medicaid program (though the fed does assume the majority of the cost at least till 2022).

So there are quite a few excuses for not having insurance, such as its now more expensive for a lot of people, especially the ones that can't afford it.

It sounds like you're talking about the Medicaid "donut hole." The ACA intended for states to expand Medicaid to cover the poorest Americans, but thanks to an unexpected supreme court challenge many Republican-controlled states opted not to expand Medicaid, putting a lot of people into the catch 22 of making too much to qualify for the existing Medicaid program, but not making enough to qualify for the new Obamacare subsidies. It's a crappy situation that's being rectified little by little as those states are cutting deals with the Obama administration.

Here's how you can hack the system, though. The IRS (who's in charge of enforcing the subidies) has determined that there's no penalty if you end up making less money in a year than you had estimated that you'd make. So if you make $20k per year, but you need to make $25k to qualify for a subsidy, you can just enter $25k at healthcare.gov, and you'll get the subsidy. If you end up making less than that when you submit that year's taxes, you won't be penalized, and you won't have to give the subsidy back. IANAL, etc.

> with [the federal ACA legislation that the insurance companies' lawyers/lobbyists wrote to mandate everyone in the nation to buy into a broken healthcare paradigm in a broken financial paradigm] there really isn't any excuse for not having health insurance

conscientious objection

The "freeloader" excuse.

Well done, Time, you've created a webpage that is unable to scroll without javascript.

Would be interesting to read about the weirdest jobs these taskrabbiters had taken, but would not be surprised if there is already a subreddit for that.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TaskRabbit/

I don't understand. The first example charges $150 an hour for general labor. Who would pay that much for unskilled labor?

For 150 an hour, you could actually attract skilled labor...

the picture appears to be him doing some plumbing -- might not be so unskilled.

Your dollar buys less in the valley, sounds like the guy has to commute in from Napa.

But he's the white guy

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