alt Hacker News> People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks.
>People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
Replies
The employer pays a large portion of the employee premiums. As a result the employee is further indentured to the employer because they cannot leave without depriving themselves and family of health care. And it further obfuscates the actual cost of health care. And then the tax code makes this bizarre setup the privileged happy path.
> Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary.
If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
> Healthcare costs [...] The only difference is with an employer intermediary, [...]
That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.
Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.
> Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned
While it may not be optimal, there is plenty of training/learning that happens in colleges.
The intermediary in healthcare makes a significant difference, as, by going through employers and using insurance, the US market is quite fragmented, and there is minimal alignment pushing prices down. The US healthcare provider doesn't get more business by providing a better cost/benefit ratio: It's easier to splurge, and get business via an expensive, comfortable-ish service.
When one then compares US facilities to foreign ones, it's trivially easy to see that many parts of the system just look different, which comes from the perverse incentives of going through employers that aren't big enough to actually push down on providers' prices at all. Both truly private, low insurance systems and universal healthcare systems end up having much better incentives, and therefore lower prices, regardless of who is paying for them.
We get something similar when you compare US universities to those in Continental Europe. It's clear that over there, the finishing school component is so vestigial as to be practically invisible, whole the focus is a filtering mechanism that attempts to teach something. Go look at, say, Spain's universities and see how many open electives are there, or how many university-wide general requirements exist (0). Each degree is basically an independent unit, and chances are you'll never visit a building from a different school. Undeclared majors? Nope. Significant number of students living on campus? Nope. Sports teams, offering scholarships? Nothing of the sort. This also leads to much lower prices to the school itself, regardless of whether it's all paid by taxes or students.
Right, the federal tax code is structured to give advantages to employer sponsored health plans. But it doesn't have to be that way. A better approach would be to eliminate those plans and force everyone to purchase individual or family plans through state ACA marketplaces using pre-tax dollars.