Let me begin with the disclaimer that I think national health care is good and that the countries that provide it for their citizens are forward-thinking and humanitarian. And, yes, I know that it’s paid for by high taxes. Call me a socialist if you want to but I live in a country with ridiculously expensive health insurance and have seen how a health crisis can easily bankrupt someone without it.
I am 62. My health has not been good for many years, and it is becoming very hard for me to work full time anymore. I’d prefer to retire but won’t because I can’t afford to buy health insurance on my own, even the “discounted” plan through my employer’s retirement system. Reducing my work hours significantly increases how much I pay for insurance through my employer. The upshot is, I’m working full time for the next three years just to be able to afford health insurance. I realized today that, if national health care was available to me, I’d quit my job tomorrow.
So, my question: does having access to national health care, where the only qualification to receive services is that you are a citizen, inadvertently encourage underemployment or unemployment?
I consider retirement a different thing from unemployment.
And I consider older workers retiring to live in security and comfort while younger workers take their place to be a good thing.
If you retired, would your boss replace you? If so, you retiring wouldn’t increase unemployment. If it took five new guys to do the work you do, it would reduce it!
Unemployment measures people who want to work, but are not working. Those who are not looking for work are not counted - that includes full time students, stay-at-home moms/dads, and the retired.
If anything, if you want to retire but are staying on the job because you need the health insurance, you are actually driving up the unemployment rate. When you quit, someone who is currently unemployed will get that job. And you’ll be retired, not unemployed.
When Obamacare was introduced, I remember reading someplace that a positive side effect was that people who were remaining in their jobs because of employer-provided health insurance were freed to quit to work independently. So if they’re able to do that, they would free up some jobs for others.
I agree that retirement is substantially different than unemployment. And, yes, if I retired, my employer would replace me, creating an opportunity for someone else (or two).
But my realization today was that, if I didn’t have to pay for health insurance, I’d stop working. So, let’s say that I’m 32, not 62. Let’s say I live frugally, am a bit lazy and lack ambition. Let’s say I do occasional odd jobs for cash, to keep me in skittles and beer. Let’s say I have the skills to be a contributing member of society but . . . well, I just don’t want to. If I get sick, the national health services will take care of it. Does knowing that, knowing that I’ll get medical services despite the fact that I’m not contributing anything to pay for it, encourage me to stay underemployed?
Speaking as someone who lives in Canada, where universal health care has been a thing for half a century, no. You might ask whether a generous welfare system or a guaranteed basic income promotes voluntary unemployment – the answer is “no” to that, too, AFAIK – but certainly not health care. What UHC does is prevent unemployment from being a greater disaster than it already is – potentially even a life-threatening one – and likewise prevents someone with a serious chronic illness from potentially facing financial ruin even if they ARE employed and insured. But the idea that someone will choose not to work and live a life of abject poverty just because they have free health care is a fantasy constructed around a straw man and not a real person who ever lived. At least, any such person would be in a vanishingly tiny aberrant minority.
More realistically – and this is something Republicans should note – UHC makes it more practical for employees to take the risk of starting their own business or opting for self-employment instead of being effectively an indentured servant to their employer because of health care. Thus it encourages independent entrepreneurship. I thought Republicans were supposed to be in favor of that sort of thing.
Heath care is in this country related to the ability to pay, or more precisely to have your medical bills paid for, not related to being a contributing member of society. Your ability to contribute to society can result in compensation which allows you to pay for heath insurance and services.
In the situation you propose medicaid would already cover this personas long as the compensation you mentioned did not exceed the limits of eligibility (AFAIK cash is reportable income), so no, it has no such effect.
I think you may be having false guilt over being able to retire and trying to justify why it is wrong.
To the extent that it diminishes one of the benefits of employment (access to reasonably-priced health insurance) it might affect employment, but we’ve got loads of other stuff that makes it easier / inviting to be a layabout wastrel (such as Medicaid), so I wouldn’t make it a primary concern.
Yeah. People being stuck in jobs that they are not a good fit for is a cost of the current system. The total efficiency of the economy would be greater if people could move more freely to jobs that they are better for. You hear a similar kind of criticism of European countries - it’s (supposedly) difficult for employers to fire employees, which means a job is not available for someone who could do better at it. In the States, we don’t have that problem, but we do have the problem of people sticking around in jobs just to maintain their insurance.
I don’t know how odd jobs are counted, but if you aren’t looking for work then you don’t count as unemployed, and the person who really wants to work and replaces you getting a job decreases the unemployment rate. You are kind of retired early, in fact.
“Workforce participation” is probably what the OP had in mind.
Our current system does keep some number in the workforce, although I haven’t seen any estimates. Keep in mind though that it can also suppress entrepreneurship. I know several people who rejected the idea of spinning out a start-up from academia or a non-profit research institution because they couldn’t risk their health benefits. Now many of those new companies would crash and burn, but some should be expected to create jobs if they can get off the ground.
yeah like the high quality of medicaid is impressive for someone to say "screw a job im covered ":rolleyes::eek::smack:
The only reason i even have it is the state of ca makes you in certain situations …
A lot of people take early retirement in Canada without giving a second thought to health insurance. It doesn’t factor into the equation. I don’t think that encourages unemployment, but rather provides options for people. It’s rather liberating when health insurance isn’t tied to your employment status.
I too remember commentary that Obamacare would help people start new businesses.
I thought then, and still think, that there is another way to achieve the same thing–make it illegal for companies to offer health insurance to their employees.
Whether that would be better or worse than the pre-Obamacare days I suppose depends largely on your point of view. But there are several potential ways for people to band together to create insurance pools, none of which depend on a person’s job status to determine eligibility for the pool.
No. It just means you have to keep working at that particular job to obtain health insurance, but if you retired someone else would take the opening. One in, one out equals zero net change at worst.
Additionally, having some kind of universal health care would help small businesses immensely. Nearly 30 years ago, my mom was trying to provide as much as she could in the way of benefits to her employees. She looked into getting health insurance for the groomers at her dog grooming shop. Turns out that a business that small (under 30 combined employees at two locations, only about 1/2 to 2/3 full-time) couldn’t get cost-effective insurance. She actually went to other grooming shops in the area to see if they could get a decent group policy if everyone went in together on it. Took months of politicking and negotiations, and it still was a significant financial drain for everyone, including the employees, for a moderate upside.
Universal health care would have reduced the time and social costs if not the financial one, and would probably have been a better benefit for the money invested. (More people = more revenue and less risk for the insurance company. If universal, revenue is very high and risk [i.e. chances of having to pay out money] is as low as possible.) It would also have meant that my mom could focus on other benefits for the employees since health insurance would already be covered.
Resident, not citizen, and you don’t need to be a permanent resident. You seem to think that the “universal” part of “universal health care” is akin to the “world” in “world series”; it’s not, we actually mean it.
UHC facilitates mobility and self-employment; I didn’t need to fish for medical insurance, the first step towards becoming self-employed was going to City Hall to register as self-employed, the second one was going to the local UHC Treasury’s Office to show my registration and report I was going to start paying for my UHC myself (“self-employed regime”). I’d say that lack of UHC does facilitate things such as retired old people needing to work menial tasks (isn’t that underemployment, or maybe under-retirement?) and people not daring to start a business because they can’t afford to lose their insurance, but maybe that’s just me.
The tax burden in Canada and the US is roughly the same. At different times the Canadian taxes are higher than the US taxes, but at other times they’re lower. Depends on economic factors and tax tinkering by governments.
Right now, the US taxes are somewhat higher than the Canadian taxes.
“Canadiens Now Paying Lower Income Taxes Than Americans, OECD Data Shows”