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Comment by ahallock | Hacker News Reader

I don't want benefits from my employer, only a paycheck. I like being as disconnected as possible, really. Why do we feel the need to be so tightly coupled to our employers? Employers only started offering these benefits to avoid taxes from what I understand.

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>Employers only started offering these benefits to avoid taxes from what I understand.

It's almost always going to be cheaper for an employer to simply not offer the benefit. What is true is that, for better or worse, there are certain benefits that employers can offer that, for tax and other reasons such as group purchasing power, the employee often can't purchase themselves at the same after-tax cost as their employer.

Health benefits are (controversially) often like this. So are many types of disability, life insurance, etc. plans, in part because with individual buyers there's an adverse selection effect. (You're more likely to want disability insurance if you know you have a high possibility of becoming disabled--and may not even be able to buy it as an individual in many cases.)

So are 401-K plans.

Long term disability insurance specifically is very expensive on the individual level but very cheap on the group level.

> Health benefits are (controversially) often like this.

To elaborate, in the US, money spent on employer-provided health insurance is not taxed, but those who pay health insurance premiums out-of-pocket must pay with after-tax dollars.

This is an improvement over the pre-ACA state of affairs in which many (perhaps most) individuals would not be able to buy insurance at all, but still it's a pretty bad deal for anyone who doesn't work for a big company.

I agree with half of that idea. Benefits should be part of the social contract of society. You should get them as part of paying taxes.

Also, if you want to shift the tax burden for these benefits from employers to employees that should be reflected in a raise of both income and taxes for employees.

I agree immensely as a remote contractor, my wife gets good benefits but if she lost her job it'd be a struggle. I think it'd make more sense, if we can't get a single-payer all paid insurance plan going, why can't the government have a democratized benefit pool where you'd pay employee prices for the same benefits as a freelancer? It would just make more sense to me.. Or at least some sort of freelance union that negotiates fair rates for things like medical/dental/vision/401k and has group purchase power.

>why can't the government have a democratized benefit pool where you'd pay employee prices for the same benefits as a freelancer?

For that to work for things like disability insurance, you'd need the same sort of mandate that's so controversial with the US ACA. The system doesn't really work if you buy benefits like disability only if you see a particular need for them. The 20-somethings need to buy them too whether they want to or not--or the system doesn't work.

I'm not sure why 401-Ks are so tied to individual employers.

The social contract of society? Sounds religious to me and also a rationalization for State power. I only believe in real contracts that I actually sign and agree to. Moving benefits to the State just gives them a monopoly on those benefits and that doesn't seem like a good solution, either.

> I only believe in real contracts that I actually sign and agree to.

I think this position is a bit idealistic, since some level of State power is unavoidable and taxes will be levied whether or not we agree with them. (Unless you escape to a desert island)

So if the tax money is real and the consequences of not paying are real, then I expect something from the government in return!

(I do agree that State power needs to be kept in check.)

"Social contracts", or regulations, solve coordination and transactional frictions problems:

http://www.raikoth.net/libertarian.html#coordination_problem...

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html#contract

The phrase "social contract" dates back to a 1762 treatise of the same name by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The stated aim of the treatise to determine whether a political authority is legitimate, i.e. the monarchies of the time period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract

Article 3, section 4 of my copy of social contract disagrees completely!

I think freedom and pay are a lot more fungible than people realize. Instead of doing the math themselves, lots of people just assume that the risk must be too high and try to jam the lever all the way towards low risk. (though there are also people making the considered decision that the stability is worth the trade-off).

What bugs me is people on both sides who act like any given choice isn't valid (like presumably all the people downvoting you).

As someone with a "pre-existing condition", health insurance is much easier to get with a group, like an employer, than it is on my own.

I heard that Obamacare outlawed discrimination based on preexisting conditions. What country are you in/what insurance difficulties are you having related to pre-existing conditions?

It's still expensive. Although it is now easier to get, it's still easier to simply join a group plan at work.

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