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Comment by Invictus0 | Hacker News Reader

You get healthcare 7 days a week but only work for 4. Salary is only one component of compensation

What a strange way to think about health care.

Can you explain what you mean when you say you only work for 4?

In the UK where this trial was run both the employer and the employee pay for National Insurance which covers nationalised healthcare. Whether you work 1 day or 7 a week, you still get covered.

In other words, you get the full package while contributing less, if you choose to work less.

You’re not contributing less, you’re contributing exactly the same amount of money.

In the UK, Your contribution is proportional to your income, which is proportional to the hours you choose to work.

Your income is not proportional to how many hours you work.

Generally, it is.

Healthcare is not part of compensation, it's a basic modern human need that societies should take care of. That your system doesn't work that way tells more about your system than what healthcare is.

We should also restrict food and housing access to the days you work.

We already do. If you work less, you get paid less, thus can afford less food and shelter. You get lower unemployment benefits. For healthcare however, you get the whole package, regardless.

Your only value as a human is based on the compensation you get from your worldview, I'm not sure many would agree with you.

If you are poor you are undeserving of care, regardless of why, your value as a human is directly attributed to how much a capitalist system values your labour.

Don't you see the disconnection and how morally wrong this is?

I reject your conveniently naive framing. Somebody has to work and pay for all the healthcare. The reality is that you might just as well be a properly compensated worker who chooses to work less, thus getting an unjustified discount on full healthcare. That is morally wrong. Of course, accommodations can be made for those who absolutely can not afford healthcare otherwise, but that is a separate question.

> Somebody has to work and pay for all the healthcare.

And that somebody is the whole of society, as a collective, supporting a system that is for the betterment of society as a whole, having less sick people in general makes a society happier, thus more productive.

This framing of trying to attribute individual contributions to a distributed societal system is, frankly, stupid, shortsighted and extremely transactional. You can and should think in broader terms than pure transactional value of someone's contribution, these are all people, like you and me, not numbers in a population. This decharacterisation of human lives into pure economical terms is a machine-like view of lives, a rationality-taken-too-far instead of having a soul.

Yes, somebody pays: everyone. Everyone contributing to make everyone's else lives better, if you can only think in transactional terms about lives I'm very sorry for you, it's a cynical way of living...

> Of course, accommodations can be made for those who absolutely can not afford healthcare otherwise, but that is a separate question.

What do you gain by introducing exceptions, special cases, and so on? Just complexity, into a system that should take care of people, not transaction their lives. That's how you end up with the convoluted insurance system the USA has, which is absurd and stupid but needs to be that way because the USA likes to put everything into a transactional mindset. Why should we care if someone is contributing more or less if the system can work without forcing this micromanagement of tracking individuals and how much they are worth based on if they work full time or not? Again, you are saying that people that work less or earn less are less deserving of care because they don't contribute as much, that's an absurd, inhumane and unempathetic view of human lives. You can be better than that, morally, we all should.

Adapt and imbue your transaction thinking with more compassion, you'd like someone to do that to your loved ones. Such extreme individualism is toxic, we are stronger together, as a species...

> And that somebody is the whole of society, as a collective, supporting a system that is for the betterment of society as a whole, having less sick people in general makes a society happier, thus more productive.

If the whole of society collectively decides that it doesn't want to do so much work for each other, because no matter how hard they work, the entitlements are the same, then everyone becomes less productive. It's not such a big deal if it's just healthcare, but the principle applies.

> What do you gain by introducing exceptions, special cases, and so on?

Welfare entitlements in general are special cases. Maybe there's no net upside in the final calculation, but then again, I'm arguing the principle.

> Again, you are saying that people that work less or earn less are less deserving of care because they don't contribute as much, that's an absurd, inhumane and unempathetic view of human lives.

Sure, whatever. This conversation has run its course.

> You get healthcare 7 days a week but only work for 4. Salary is only one component of compensation

Thinking of healthcare as compensation is what got America into the healthcare mess it's in today.

well, it's not the root cause. there's many reasons why healthcare is way too expensive in america. the fact is that employers pay a huge sum for healthcare in the US and this makes up a sizable portion of your compensation. if you earn 50K and the health insurance for your family costs 20K per year, that's pretty big.

the solution of course is to get those healthcare premiums lowered: that's going to require some kind of rationing.

Cost controls, not rationing. The problem is that capitalism fails in the case of healthcare. How much is your health worth? Every last cent you’ve got.

cost controls are a form of rationing and a good one, at least for the field of healthcare.

It emerged from government wage and price controls, wherein health care coverage was exempted. When employers couldn’t compete by raising wages (as that was made illegal), they chose to compete on health coverage. By the time the wage controls were rolled back, it was hard to get that genie back into the bottle.

There used to be a maximum wage in the United States?

There was not a maximum wage, but there was a prohibition on raising wages: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942#Co...

Thanks for your argument that health care should not be connected in any way to employment.

Dock it off my paycheck too, I don't care, I want that 4-day work week!

Though of course, being in the Netherlands, my employer doesn't pay for my health insurance.

Edit: as for the general point about compensation being more than salary, it is also common in the Netherlands that PTO is prorated to the hours you work per week. That is fine; I'm happy to scale everything down to 4/5th if I can scale my working hours down to that.

Agreed that it makes total sense to scale PTO. I think of my PTO as being “4 weeks off of my choosing”. If I worked 32 hours per week, I’d expect 128 hours of PTO instead of 160.

That's only a problem if you believe that the 33rd hour is as productive as the 23rd hour, which isn't the case. We're talking about 4 day work weeks, not 4 hour work weeks.

Good thing I live in a reasonable country and get health care whether I work or not.

Health insurance isn't THAT expensive. This is ridiculous

American employers pay ~$22k/yr for those that prefer numbers:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/employers-family-health-insuran...

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