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Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

This will not happen, and the reason is that Obamacare made a great effort to decouple health care insurance and benefits from the employer. Since insurance is now available for purchase on the open marketplace, there are whole classes of employers who don't need to worry about including it in their benefits packages which they offer. It would be a step backwards to require or force companies to include it, especially to gig workers or contract employees; they should simply compensate them enough that they can afford to purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace.

If you do not like this structure then you should have worked to block Obamacare from becoming law, because that was a primary objective of the legislation: to decouple health care plans from large companies and employers, and make that insurance more accessible, on the free market, to more workers than ever before.

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That was one of the good parts of the ACA, although it also inexplicably added employer insurance mandates that created predictable perverse incentives (e.g. employees being limited to less than 30 hours/week). The whole thing is ridiculous: your employer should have no more involvement with your health care or insurance than they do with your food or housing.

From outside the US looking in health care being in any way related to employment just seems nuts.

Actually, the primary objective of the ACA is in the name...Affordable Care. And if that's the metric, it's not achieving its goal. We should also remember that the promise was to lower prices by legally forcing the younger (read: less likely to use services) to sign up. That didn't last long.

Editorial: This is why everyone calls it Obamacare. The Reps love the knock. The Dems are not wanting to remind anyone Affordable is in the name.

Note: I'm not knocking ACA per se. We should have health care. The issue is ACA is a fine example of: good idea, poor execution. And no one has the will to fix what is by most accounts not living up to its promise or need.

It was fairly affordable the first couple years. And then the insurance companies started finding loopholes and increased prices drastically every annually.

That being said, let's pray the Inflation Reduction Act fares better than ACA.

the green new deal packaged up with a deceptive name? It won't do anything.

> Obamacare made a great effort to decouple health care insurance and benefits from the employer

Did it? There was lots of talk at the time about how you get to keep your private plan. And the actual text of the ACA mandated that large employers offer health insurance, which was not the case before the ACA.

What provisions in the ACA made great efforts to decouple them? i.e., which provisions incentivized individuals to not be on employer plans, or employers not to offer them?

> Since insurance is now available for purchase on the open marketplace, there are whole classes of employers who don't need to worry about including it in their benefits packages which they offer.

I'm not sure what you mean by "decoupled." I could buy private health insurance prior to the ACA and it was cheaper (at least for me it was). Also, I wouldn't call the marketplace "open." Right now health insurance is like the internet in that you can only purchase it from local providers and you can only realistically use it at "in network providers" without the cost becoming astronomical. The lack of competition is what is artificially keeping prices high. Case in point: my dental and vision insurance can be used in all 50 states with a huge number of providers and costs a fraction of what my health insurance costs.

> Case in point: my dental and vision insurance can be used in all 50 states with a huge number of providers and costs a fraction of what my health insurance costs.

Isn't that largely because dental and vision insurance has pretty limited coverage? For example if you get oral or eye cancer that would usually be covered by your health plan, not your dental or vision plan.

Health insurance is more comprehensive so I would expect it to cost more. The issue is it cost far more than it should in no small part due to lack of competition.

Which company are you using for dental and vision? What are the benefits? How much do you pay?

>they should simply compensate them enough that they can afford to purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace.

agreed, but they won't. Most of the "gig" companies are exploitative parasites.

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