An interesting facet of a universal healthcare system is how much it could increase competition due to relieving healthcare costs for SMBs and for manufacturing industries like automotive by removing their healthcare obligations.
You actually net increase the ability of people to work for themselves. Healthcare is often cited as one of the primarily reasons people don’t take the step to found their own business.
Not to mention that if you want more equity between employer / employee relationships we need more ways to break up the asymmetric leverage of the relationship and this is a major one that traps folks
Considering the salaries of software engineers healthcare costs in the US are way cheaper than most EU countries. Also, you don't have to wait months to see a doctor.
this is a good point. there really used to be two major items that were part of this asymmetric leverage. one of them, retirement plans, have started to disappear, and that's a good thing.
- as you mentioned health insurance (and to some extent life insurance, cheap when young, but not so cheap as you get older)
- retirement. this seems to be steadily changing to 401K type schemes. the 85 point (age + years of service = 85) pensions are solidly in the rear view mirror, and i for one, applaud that. you can take your 401K where-ever you want and decide for yourself what age and how much money you need.
but i have other problems with "universal" health care though; the VA has something like this and it's not better. must it be that way? maybe not, but is it likely be that way? yeah...
then you have the free-rider problem vs. basic human rights. i'd just be happy if everybody could purchase the same insurance at the same price employed or not if they wished to do so. it's not quite there yet, although i have received quotes from Kaiser in CA for equivalent individual policies are that are nearly the same price to what just my parole deduction portion is from $$big$$corp - not counting their ~40-50% portion. which implies, as usual, big companies are being not very efficient. billing is a disaster; why is my insurance charged $50,000 for something i can buy out-of-pocket for $5,000? patents and drug companies are a disaster; problem: drugs are too expensive - solution: give artificial monopolies...
so what we've done so far in this country manages is a half-measure that manages to be worse than what we had before and just as bad or worse than some ideal universal health care would be. i acknowledge that health care is a thorny problem, nothing seems to be a good answer and we're highly unlikely to be fixing it (by fix, i mean make it better, not just doing more stupid stuff).
You actually net increase the ability of people to work for themselves. Healthcare is often cited as one of the primarily reasons people don’t take the step to found their own business.
Not to mention that if you want more equity between employer / employee relationships we need more ways to break up the asymmetric leverage of the relationship and this is a major one that traps folks