In a move that could prompt more companies to offer paid parental leave, Microsoft is announcing today that it will require all of its U.S.-based suppliers and vendors with more than 50 employees to offer such benefits.
Having your health and healthcare benefits tied to your employer is an incredibly stupid system – it keeps unhappy people tied to your company because they’re too dependent to leave, and it raises healthcare costs for everybody else. No wonder the US healthcare system is a complete and utter disaster.
Requiring companies to provide health care encourages greedy execs to outsource as much as possible to places that don’t require it. However, you still need health coverage, and the government sure as hell doesn’t want to provide it. They bitch enough as it is over medicare for seniors. Imagine if they had to provide the same thing for everyone…
It’s not the government who bitch about it. It’s certain ideologue politicians (and their easily led (maths-illiterate) voters) who bitch about it.
Thom Holwerda,
I agree full-heartedly, it’s stupid however you cut it. The reason this isn’t getting fixed is that the families most negatively affected by our terrible private health insurance system have the least power to change it, and those who have the most power to change health insurance are the least interested in doing so seriously.
It’s not just health care, the corruption is perverse and health care is just one way that the middle class is being attacked. I’m very concerned with what the rise of fascism means for us.
Unfortunately too many people benefit from the current state of affairs. Specifically about $3.5 trillion of benefit or nearly 20% of GDP. For comparison Canada seems to spend about 6.5% of their GDP, and has healthcare for all.
All these groups (insurance companies, doctors, medical device manufacturers, drug manufacturers, universities, cleaning etc. suppliers, and more importantly people who have invested on these companies’ stocks, and large retirement funds) will need to lose about half of the income to make this thing even close to affordable.
Again, you need to chop off about 10% of US GDP to make healthcare affordable. There is no way around that.
That is why I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon.
Ironically, the whole company provided insurance was an outgrowth of payroll tax structure. It was cheaper to give employee benefits than raising their wages. So everyone did it, removing the pressure for many with good jobs that have insurance from pressuring the government to provide it to all.
Now its a nasty hairball of an industry thats very difficult to unwind fairly, even if there were the will to do so.
> Having your health and healthcare benefits tied to your employer is an incredibly stupid system
Funny that you say that, because this works just fine in many other countries…
Can you give some examples where that works just fine? The countries that I know where it works just fine (Europe, Japan) have it tied to the government, not the employer.
My own country (Netherlands) used to have a public and a private part and that worked relatively well. However since it switched to mostly public it works better. Of course there is still the possibility for private extra’s because no country actually has a black-and-white healthcare system where it is only government, only employer, only personal insurance
The U.S. doesn’t force an employees to take your employers insurance policy, it never did. It tried to make sure everyone had insurance. If you didn’t want to you would be taxed if you didn’t have insurance, but lets face it the fee you were charged was really low to go without insurance for the year.
What normally happens when some idiot ends up in the hospital for a couple of days and doesn’t have insurance. Well, what happens, they end up receiving a bill they can’t pay, from anywhere from 50,000 up. What normally ends up happening, is the state you end up usually pays that bill, or if you can’t get the state to take it. You will end up having to go into heavy debt. In some state they will come after your property if you try to avoid paying it.
So you scream corrupt system, perhaps you are right. Was it better before? No the problem there was some people thought they were covered, and realized they were not covered. What’s more, if the insurance companies found out you had pre-existing conditions, they would cancel your insurance policy. Or they would justify a reason to drop you. So what the current administration did was give the insurance company the ability to make those bad insurance policies again. And removed the little push to get an insurance policy. So you are paying for insurance that doesn’t really cover anything major.
Finally, I don’t think it is an insurance issue. Since it doesn’t get forwarded to the insurance company in my company, I guess you could get an insurance policy that covers such leave, just like you can get an insurance policy that will pay you if you loose your job, or cover your mortgage payment if you loose your job. It is broken up like PTO, sick, and family paternity leave. All Microsoft is doing is, saying we aren’t going to work with others that do not value their employees like we do. Isn’t the changes in NAFTA that is being proposed kind of similar in the paying of workers etc? Basically, trying to make it not worth going to Canada or Mexico.
Eh, just do what Canada does…