The optimal amount of protection provided by businesses is none. Employees are like any other costs, that may need to change based on supply and demand.
The government should be providing protection, by way of providing education and welfare to support reallocation of labor, and taxing businesses to do it. Requiring each business to do it and then policing them is far less efficient for all parties.
California’s taxes and cost of labor combined are surely up there.
Besides a fractured market with lots of different bureaucracies to deal with, the lack of at-will employment is a big labor cost when you need to be able to quickly spin up or spin down operations.
Welfare should always be a responsibility of the government, not businesses. Let businesses business and let government redistribute wealth.
The costs of delivering potable water and removing sewage/excess rain from a given lot or area is unrelated to the quantity of rainfall in a timespan measuring less than quite a few years.
Of the $250 of a water bill on Seattle’s Eastside, about $50 of it is something I can do anything about (use less water). The rest is fixed costs even if I never use a drop. It isn’t hard to imagine that California isn’t much different.
Health insurers are required to accept all insureds without pricing the insured’s risks. It would increase premiums a lot if people could bounce around, as it would make already difficult to forecast medical loss ratios even more volatile.
This really is a problem only the government can solve, by continuously auditing coverage decisions at random, and sufficiently penalizing the companies that understaff at best, and intentionally deny or delay payment at worst.
Currently, years might go by until CMS audits the company, and even then, there are no consequences. Try arguing for a higher budget for more $400k doctors and $200k pharmacists in this environment.
The current situation is because one company can lower premiums by reducing quality of service, all the other ones have to also, and the buyer rarely buys on anything but price since it’s usually a third party buying it, like an employer.
> Health insurers are required to accept all insureds without pricing the insured’s risks. It would increase premiums a lot if people could bounce around, as it would make already difficult to forecast medical loss ratios even more volatile.
It's almost as if there is nothing insurance-like about US health "insurance" but the name.
Picture health insurance models laid on top of your car. Imagine your car gets totaled:
Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25,000 for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. Buttttt... that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."
US health insurance premiums are not insurance-like, as they are mostly a tax due to the forced wealth redistribution.
US health insurance coverage is very insurance-like, due to the out of pocket maximum.
Determining auto insurance coverage is very simple, because fixing/replacing cars is simple.
Determining health insurance coverage can't be simple, because fixing bodies is not simple. It's unknown what will and will not fix issues, how to even measure if there is an issue, and what will cause more issues and the cost/benefit of that fix.
The people who can fix the issue are a lot more rare and in demand than the people who can fix automobiles.
Also, the medicine is patented, and the seller of the medicine wants to be able to charge different prices to different buyers, hence all the games.
> US health insurance coverage is very insurance-like, due to the out of pocket maximum.
Well, other than that whole "out of network" thing...
> Determining health insurance coverage can't be simple, because fixing bodies is not simple. It's unknown what will and will not fix issues, how to even measure if there is an issue, and what will cause more issues and the cost/benefit of that fix.
Don't disagree - but that doesn't make what we have more "insurance-like".
The 2017 TCJA removed the individual mandate. Presumably, that is what FrustratedMonky and kccqzy are referring to.
Obviously, the ACA made it so all health insurance premiums have a large "tax" component, due to the extremely narrow underwriting criteria health insurers are allowed to use. The individual mandate had previously applied a tax to all taxpayers, but after TCJA 2017, the tax is only paid by people with health insurance.
>Enacted in December 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the shared responsibility payment to zero for tax year 2019 and all subsequent years.
Right… why do you think they spent so much time intentionally rigging the courts with illegitimate judges? They’ve been planning a non-democratic takeover of the country FOR A LONG FUCKING TIME. They are just more open about it now.
I expect another K shaped graph here where the top 20 universities or so located in the top 10 or 20 metros compete for the top 10% of the population while the rest are on the downward leg of the K.
They should have said total fertility rate. Birth rates have absolutely been in a steady decline for decades.
EDIT, also, looking at TFR, it's been bumping around but there was clearly a collapse in the 60s. I wouldn't use that to show that the population of the US is growing healthily enough to support capitalism.
Technically, the number of high school graduates dropping wouldn’t have affected colleges yet if enrollment rates kept going up, but they have also declined (only a couple percent for now, but I bet that trend continues).
Also, seeing only 40% of high school graduates going to college is a wake up call to how much I don’t interact with people outside my bubble, because I don’t know anyone whose kids didn’t go to college in the last 20 years.
The government should be providing protection, by way of providing education and welfare to support reallocation of labor, and taxing businesses to do it. Requiring each business to do it and then policing them is far less efficient for all parties.
reply