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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

The real fix is to just stop tying benefit requirements to who the employer is and what the employee's full time status is. A lot of these problems go away with just universal healthcare, and providing benefits beyond pay via society rather than via companies.

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We have socialized healthcare in the USA, we just deliver it at the emergency room, the worst possible place. The more we get people to realize that we already have this the more we can reduce the resistance to expanding it in a sane way. America 100% has socialized medicine. Go to the emergency room and you will be treated.

I don't think that's a productive tactic-- it leads people to believe the situation isn't as bad as it is. The only people who get actually free care at the ER are too poor for debt collectors to bother harassing. There's no reality in which giving someone a bill for tens of thousands of dollars constitutes socialized medicine just because they don't have to pay upfront.

We pay for a socialized healthcare system already, we just pay the same amount again of private overhead on top of an already socialized system. Our system is just a huge waste at this point.

We certainly waste more money than we'd spend on socialized health care. I've heard plenty of people argue that we don't need socialized health care because hospitals are required to treat people without upfront payment. Those two things are only tangentially related and tying them together in that context doesn't seem like a great position to argue from.

> I've heard plenty of people argue that we don't need socialized health care because hospitals are required to treat people without upfront payment.

This is why countries like Switzerland require everyone to buy insurance. The system doesn't work if everyone freeloads.

(I guess we would still call Switzerland socialized, since the insurance prices are heavily regulated, everyone is basically in the same risk pools, and subsidies are given to those who don't meet thresholds)

If everyone in the US was in the same risk pool, and we had some good rules in place to prevent insurance company fuckery like denying legitimate claims based on spurious accusations that are difficult to prove wrong or preexisting conditions, then it probably wouldn't matter that it was private. But at that point, why make it private? If we acknowledge that insurance is so fundamental to existence that we require people to buy it, and the individual mandate says that we do, why add stockholders into the mix? At least make it a gov-owned private company like the fed if people are worried about executive dexterity.

I went the ER, was treated, and was sent a bill that must get turned over to god knows who if I didn't pay it. They took an x-ray, a blood sample, sent me home, and I got billed $4,800.

Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed. It might hurt some, but if these companies can not survive without workers, they will hire full time. And if they can not afford they don't deserve to exist.

> Why not mandate things like healthcare no matter how many hours someone is employed.

Isn't that what Universal Healthcare does? They obviously charge premiums, but they are a percentage of income that goes all the way down to 0.

Universal healthcare takes healthcare from being a concern to companies at all, and now they can just hire who they want for however long they want. It also makes the labor pool much more fluid, and makes low end jobs much more viable (morally and economically).

Some people specifically want part time work. Tying things to employment that don't cleanly scale up or down with hours removes useful flexibility.

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