Wells Fargo: Invisible Hand Let's Girl Die.

[The Dark Lord]

Originally Posted by ddt

Decisions to cut costs are not always taken rationally, so rejecting it for "they wouldn't go after such small costs" isn't quite convincing. Also, a company the size of Wells Fargo has many divisions and subdivisions. The concrete decisions what costs to cut are not necessarily taken at the company level, but may well be left up to divisions or subdivisions, so you can't either say that we then would see more Gonzalezes: this may well have been a type of cost cutting unique to his division or branch.

This is a good argument. Although I question whether company's insurance pool would even be a factor for a branch manager or whoever.

[ddt]

Originally Posted by Skeptical Greg

We were linked to an article in the Daily Mail..

Any indication this item is being headlined anywhere else ?

HuffPost, Z6Mag, amongst others. And look in my post #110 for a link to the actual complaint filed in court.

[ddt]

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

This is a good argument. Although I question whether company's insurance pool would even be a factor for a branch manager or whoever.

Good point. The HuffPost article says that United Health Care insures Wells Fargo.

In another point, Gonzalez mentions in his complaint that he filed a complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, and that they concluded that there "reasonable cause exists to believe that an unlawful employment practice occurred."

[fuelair]

Originally Posted by WildCat

I'm guessing this guy was escorted out by security when he was fired, and told not to come back. Unfortunately it's not unheard of in this country for a fired employee to show up with a gun to take his revenge.

Possibly because of the pointless embarrassment of being escorted out by security like a criminal. Problem really is they usually shoot the wrong people/person.

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by tyr_13

...Employers offered health care as compensation before the government did anything to subsidize it.¹ Some employers don't offer health care even though the governments gives certain tax breaks that make doing so easier.² You'll try to blame this on the government of course though convoluted reasoning that requires words to be redefined from their common or even legal meanings.³...Why are you against employers offering benefits?⁴...That's decidedly anti-free market...Why shouldn't society get together and decide that the government should be the vehicle for medical insurance?⁵ ... It's becoming a waste to even try to read anything you post because the outcome is always the same: money good, government bad.⁶...You'll have the tenacity to claim that it's all a misrepresentation⁷...

1. Perhaps some did. So?
2. The State of Hawaii has for years mandated employer-funded health insurance for full-time employees. Dunno 'bout elsewhere.
3. Anyone can read statute books. Hawaii is not the only State that mandated employer-funded health insurance, I believe.
4. I'm not. Personally, I prefer cash. I'm opposed to government agencies compensating employees in anything but cash, for the sake of budget transparency. This policy would also make health insurance more portable if employees bought their own.
5. Eduardo Zambrano
"Formal Models of Authority: Introduction and Political Economy Applications"
Rationality and Society, May 1999

Quote:

Aside from the important issue of how it is that a ruler may economize on communication, contracting and coercion costs, this leads to an interpretation of the state that cannot be contractarian in nature: citizens would not empower a ruler to solve collective action problems in any of the models discussed, for the ruler would always be redundant and costly. The results support a view of the state that is eminently predatory, (the ? MK.) case in which whether the collective actions problems are solved by the state or not depends on upon whether this is consistent with the objectives and opportunities of those with the (natural) monopoly of violence in society. This conclusion is also reached in a model of a predatory state by Moselle and Polak (1997). How the theory of economic policy changes in light of this interpretation is an important question left for further work.

Joel Fried
Pots and Kettles: Governance Practices of the Ontario Securities Commission

Quote:

2. The Government’s Principal – Agent Problem
The principal-agent problem for the private sector is well known: the owner/principal delegates to a manager/agent the responsibility to provide some services for the principal.
The problem is one of structuring contracts and institutions to insure that, in carrying out her duties, the agent acts in the principal’s interest rather than her own.
Citizens of a country also face a principal – agent problem. Citizens “own” the machinery of government and employ bureaucrats to act as their agents in running this machinery. To reduce the costs of monitoring, the principals choose a legislature/board of directors to oversee the agents. Monitoring mechanisms are similar to those in the private sector: there are financial accounting standards that are met for each budgetary unit, and an external auditor checks these internal accounts. Transparency is maintained, in part, through freedom of information regulations. Compliance with procedures and other regulations are met both through internal monitoring and checks by units external to the bureau. Finally, contracts are structured, at least in a limited manner, to align the incentives for agents with those of the principals.
There is, however, an additional problem in the public sector that does not exist for private firms. The firm has a well defined objective function – the maximization of profits – whereas the apparent objective for the government is the maximization of some index of a (weighted) level of welfare of the electorate. An unambiguous index of social welfare has been impossible to construct and, in its absence, monitoring the public sector is further complicated because data is generally lacking on whether or not the objective was actually approached and/or achieved and what the costs are that are linked to any specific objective. In effect, because of distribution issues and public goods, the cash flows measured with traditional accounting procedures will be, at best, only superficially correlated with that objective. Thus, looking at cash flows will provide the principals an extremely poor method of monitoring their public sector agents.

6. False.
7. It is. Government threats of interpersonal violence can suppress free lance dealers in violence. Also (see Zambrano, above), a government may usefully standardize some interactions, such as rules of the road, standardized weights and measures, and so on. A government can also suppress anti-social activity where privatization is impractical, such as airborne pollution or protection of migratory species. I have never said otherwise. Tyr grossly misrepresents my position.

[squealpiggy]

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick;8528268
Part two is mistaken. Everybody dies. Throughout [B

human prehistory[/b] and most of history, reduced family income has reduced life expectancy.

This comment was in response to the following statement:

Quote:

There is no other modern country where a child could die of an untreated illness because her father lost his job.

Throughout human prehistory and most of history there weren't any modern countries by today's standard of modernity.

[Beerina]

Originally Posted by RandFan

Fire? In any event, this could have been one of many issues. And I also said that perhaps they were running the risk of higher premiums. Insurance companies do break relationships with large customers or they seek contracts with larger premiums with their clients. If anything the later is more likely than the former.

That said, I likely wouldn't post the story now without more information.

Many (most?) large companies are self-insured, just using the insurance house as a provider interface. Actual medical costs are passed through.

It's presumably cheaper, by a little bit, as they are so large they're an accurate actuarial subset of the general population. As such there is little statistical risk, so they can cut out the risk overhead part of what normal insurance would cost them.

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by squealpiggy

Throughout human prehistory and most of history there weren't any modern countries by today's standard of modernity.

I expected that someone would make this objection. In most of the world today, life passes as it has for hundreds of years: people plant and harvest in season, or they labor for others. Many States today make the promise of a tax-funded safety net. Whether they can keep that promise for long is the central topic of this year's US preidential election. In most of the world, even today, loss of income means reduced life expectancy.

[RandFan]

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

But they do not make decisions to cut costs by firing employees whose dependents need expensive health care all the time. With a company with as many employees as Wells Fargo, there would be a lot. And yes, we would have heard about it.

Your assertion is absurd and it's just that, an assertion. No. There is no reason to think we would have heard about it and case law will tell you that companies fire people all of the time for the most outrageous of reasons.

Quote:

Unless you think every single other previous person this happened to just allowed Wells Fargo to screw them rather than hire a lawyer (would be easy to find one to take it on a contingency basis) and/or tell the media about it.

Not every case makes it to the headlines. Again, you are simply appealing to intuition. That might be your intuition but it isn't mine. It's ad hoc rationalization and this is becoming absurd argument ad nauseam.

[LashL]

Originally Posted by Skeptical Greg

We were linked to an article in the Daily Mail..

Any indication this item is being headlined anywhere else ?

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/flori...ry?id=16971876

It sounds like the girl did have surgery at some point, although it's a bit vague on that. The company says the fellow's dismissal was not related to health care costs, and the hospital says it would never, ever abandon a child who needed care.

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by SezMe

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

"Society", maybe, in some fashion. Government? No.

Malcolm, government is the expression of society in an organized form.¹

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

In abstract, the medical service industry and the medical insurance industry are very unlikely candidates for State operation or control.

I don't know what the first two words mean in this context² but the rest of the post is refuted by the rest of the OECD countries.³ There society (read, governnment) is under operation and control with the result that their society is better off health-wise and spends half (or less) than the USA. It would appear, then, that the word "unlikely" is not correct and, in fact, should be replaced by the word "obvious".⁴

1. We disagree. The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Weber). This is not a criticism of government, it's a definition. The government is a bunch of guys with guns. People do not become more intelligent, better-informed, more altruistic, or more capable (except to the extent that their access to the tools of organized violence enhances their ability to influence events) when they enter the State's employment rolls. Often in history, invaders have imposed governments on unwilling subjects. Coups and stolen elections also rebut the assertion that "government is the expression of society..." That's mystical nonsense. Democracy (voting) is one feedback mechanism. So is a legal regime of private property and contract law.
2. This.
3. Aggregate cost and longevity statistics do not imply the conclusion that advocates for a State role in the medical service industry assert.
4. Amazon review of Seeing Like a State

Quote:

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics -- the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry?
In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot -- be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

"A broad-ranging, theoretically important, and empirically grounded treatment of the modern state and its propensity to simplify and make legible a society which by nature is complex and opaque. For anyone interested inlearning about this fundamental tension of modernity and about the destruction wrought in the twentieth century as a consequence of the dominant development ideology of the simplifying state, this is a must-read". -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners

[RandFan]

Originally Posted by LashL

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/flori...ry?id=16971876

It sounds like the girl did have surgery at some point, although it's a bit vague on that. The company says the fellow's dismissal was not related to health care costs, and the hospital says it would never, ever abandon a child who needed care.

Thanks. Story is looking weak. We'll see.

[varwoche]

As a public service, allow me to explain Malcolm Kirkpatrick's curious post.

Bob001 posted...

Originally Posted by Bob001

There is no other modern country where a child could die of an untreated illness because her father lost his job.

To which Malcolm replied...

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Everybody dies. Throughout human prehistory and most of history, reduced family income has reduced life expectancy.

Which is explained by:

Originally Posted by Bob001's post as read by Malcolm

In countries with socialized medicine, people don't die.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

[Skeptical Greg]

Originally Posted by RandFan

Thanks. Story is looking weak. We'll see.

Really..

It's looking more and more like a lawyer in search of deep pockets; and of course, we have never seen that before..


Do you ( collective ) think these news stories may have been precipitated by the spamming of a press release from some lawyer's office ?

[SezMe]

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

The government is a bunch of guys with guns.

What a horribly crippling definition of government you hold. No wonder your ideas are so far out in the weeds.

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

3. Aggregate cost and longevity statistics do not imply the conclusion that advocates for a State role in the medical service industry assert.

That seems to leave us with two options. One is that you read other people's minds and tell us what they are thinking or, two, you simply choose to ignore the reality of those statistics. I look forward to your choice.

[Kid Eager]

Question:

If you do a search of the interwebs for the phrase:

"The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality", the only returns are posts in forums various by Malcolm Kirkpatrick.

Does one person frequently saying the same thing make it a definition?

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by Kid Eager

Question:

If you do a search of the interwebs for the phrase:

"The government of a locality is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality", the only returns are posts in forums various by Malcolm Kirkpatrick.

Does one person frequently saying the same thing make it a definition?

The phrasing is unusual, but that doesn't discredit the concept. The nice thing about English (and possibly some other languages?) is that an idea remains substantially the same regardless of which synonymous forms it takes.

It strikes me that "argument by absence of evidence in a Google search" is possibly even more tiresome than "argument by dictionary definition".

However, you may be interested in the same concept by a different name: "Monopoly on violence".

Would you like me to Google that for you, or can your mad research skills figure it out from here?

[RandFan]

Originally Posted by Skeptical Greg

Really..

I've been known to dish out. I posted the story. Guess I deserve that. Thanks Greg.

[The Dark Lord]

Originally Posted by RandFan

Your assertion is absurd and it's just that, an assertion. No. There is no reason to think we would have heard about it and case law will tell you that companies fire people all of the time for the most outrageous of reasons.

Not every case makes it to the headlines. Again, you are simply appealing to intuition. That might be your intuition but it isn't mine. It's ad hoc rationalization and this is becoming absurd argument ad nauseam.

Your belief that they could have done this lots of times before without anybody or their lawyer ever having gone to the media is the absurd one and I am having a hard time believing that you actually believe that.

[Kid Eager]

Originally Posted by theprestige

The phrasing is unusual, but that doesn't discredit the concept. The nice thing about English (and possibly some other languages?) is that an idea remains substantially the same regardless of which synonymous forms it takes.

It strikes me that "argument by absence of evidence in a Google search" is possibly even more tiresome than "argument by dictionary definition".

However, you may be interested in the same concept by a different name: "Monopoly on violence".

Would you like me to Google that for you, or can your mad research skills figure it out from here?

Well if somebody keeps saying that phrase is a definition, you would expect to see that definition popping up in other than that person's posts, hmmmm?
After all, I have mad research skills (definition)

[RandFan]

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

Your belief that they could have done this lots of times before without anybody or their lawyer ever having gone to the media is the absurd one and I am having a hard time believing that you actually believe that.

Oh for crying in the dark. What on earth are you talking about? I never claimed any such thing. I claimed that businesses make brain dead cost cutting decisions all of the time. I have no idea whatsoever how often this business or any business has fired someone to avoid paying for employee medical bills.

Can you A.) stop ignoring my points? B.) Stop with the straw men?

• Insurance companies deny claims all of the time. Often times those denied claims result in death. The vast majority don't result in news stories.
• Companies fire people for all kinds of stupid reasons all the time (see retaliation against whistle blowers). Most of these stories never make the news
• With 300,000,000 people in America and the hundred thousands of fired workers and also the sheer number of people dying due to malfeasance or greed or murder or manslaughter etc., etc. there is no reason to believe that even IF your straw man was my argument that we should expect to see news stories on it.

Following your logic we should be inundated with news stories for all of these examples.

Quote:

I am having a hard time believing that you actually believe that.

I'm having a hard time believing you really don't get this. It's simple, you have a bias, you want to protect that bias. So you argue ad hoc appealing to intuition and argument by assertion. Your logic is fallacious.

ETA: And it's getting really, really old.

[The Dark Lord]

Originally Posted by RandFan

Oh for crying in the dark. What on earth are you talking about? I never claimed any such thing

Now I am starting to think that you are just dishonest. Or maybe Wells Fargo did this before, people sued them and went to the media, but for some reason nobody ever printing a story on it until now? And no current story mentions any previous lawsuit?

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

Sure companies like Wells Fargo make decisions to cut costs all the time. But they do not make decisions to cut costs by firing employees whose dependents need expensive health care all the time. And yes, we would have heard about it.

Originally Posted by RandFan

Your assertion is absurd and it's just that, an assertion. No. There is no reason to think we would have heard about it and case law will tell you that companies fire people all of the time for the most outrageous of reasons.

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

Unless you think every single other previous person this happened to just allowed Wells Fargo to screw them rather than hire a lawyer (would be easy to find one to take it on a contingency basis) and/or tell the media about it.

Originally Posted by RandFan

Not every case makes it to the headlines. Again, you are simply appealing to intuition. That might be your intuition but it isn't mine. It's ad hoc rationalization and this is becoming absurd argument ad nauseam.

Quote:

I claimed that businesses make brain dead cost cutting decisions all of the time. I have no idea whatsoever how often this business or any business has fired someone to avoid paying for employee medical bills.

Can you A.) stop ignoring my points? B.) Stop with the straw men?

• Insurance companies deny claims all of the time. Often times those denied claims result in death. The vast majority don't result in news stories.
• Companies fire people for all kinds of stupid reasons all the time (see retaliation against whistle blowers). Most of these stories never make the news
• With 300,000,000 people in America and the hundred thousands of fired workers and also the sheer number of people dying due to malfeasance or greed or murder or manslaughter etc., etc. there is no reason to believe that even IF your straw man was my argument that we should expect to see news stories on it.

Following your logic we should be inundated with news stories for all of these examples.

No. Because those things are widely known to happen so they aren't really news. A large corporation firing employees to avoid paying for healthcare in addition to being an evil thing to do is not something that is known to happen all the time and is news.

Quote:

I'm having a hard time believing you really don't get this. It's simple, you have a bias, you want to protect that bias. So you argue ad hoc appealing to intuition and argument by assertion. Your logic is fallacious.

ETA: And it's getting really, really old.

And you're bias free.

[SezMe]

Originally Posted by theprestige

However, you may be interested in the same concept by a different name: "Monopoly on violence".

No gangs in your neighborhood, eh? No drugs either? Can I move in?

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by SezMe

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

...The government is a bunch of guys with guns...

What a horribly crippling definition of government you hold. No wonder your ideas are so far out in the weeds.¹

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

Aggregate cost and longevity statistics do not imply the conclusion that advocates for a State role in the medical service industry assert.

That seems to leave us with two options. One is that you read other people's minds and tell us what they are thinking or, two, you simply choose to ignore the reality of those statistics.²

1. It's no more a definition than "a cat is a mammal", which is true, but not a definition. You clipped the definition. The point of "bunch of guys with guns" is to underline that there is no good reason to assign to this bunch of guys responsibility for medical service delivery or education service delivery than to assign these functions to Goodyear Tire Company or to the National Football League. It's outside their area of expertise.
2. It's obvious from the context in which they appear what supporters of State-funded or State operated medical services intend these statistics to imply. Or they are insane and make observations on clouds and squirrels at random.

I look forward to your choice.[/quote]

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by SezMe

Originally Posted by theprestige

However, you may be interested in the same concept by a different name: "Monopoly on violence".

No gangs in your neighborhood, eh?...

That's why "largest dealer" (my formulation) is more accurate the usual paraphrase of Weber: "monopoly on violence".
Why not try the suggested search?

[The Dark Lord]

Originally Posted by SezMe

No gangs in your neighborhood, eh? No drugs either? Can I move in?

No gangs in my town. Drugs? Well, there probably isn't a community in America without them.

[tyr_13]

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

1. Perhaps some did. So?

It directly disproves your whining about state coercion in this matter. Now you tried to move the goalposts away from this later, but I like others here are fully capable of remember and rereading what you said. Remember, you wanted to know why they were responsible for his family's healthcare insurance. The answer is that they agreed to be as part of his compensation for work. You whined that it was the governments doing because, " "Agreed" in the legal/tax environment that legislators constucted (corporate income taxes, individual income taxes, deduction of "cost of health insurance" from taxable corporate income)." Yet it's in actuality market forces that compelled them to do so. They didn't have to, but they find it is an advantage in order to attract and retain skilled employees. Companies did this before, and some companies don't still.

Market forces led to employee health insurance yet you argue against it and still manage to blame the government for it. It seems you're just against anyone gaining health insurance any way besides directly purchasing it themselves.

Quote:

2. The State of Hawaii has for years mandated employer-funded health insurance for full-time employees. Dunno 'bout elsewhere.
3. Anyone can read statute books. Hawaii is not the only State that mandated employer-funded health insurance, I believe.

More red herrings like all your mentions of government in this case. This addresses nothing.

Quote:

4. I'm not. Personally, I prefer cash. I'm opposed to government agencies compensating employees in anything but cash, for the sake of budget transparency. This policy would also make health insurance more portable if employees bought their own.

Except to people who actually have medical conditions of course. There are many reasons this is a bad idea. One of the main ones is it makes government a less attractive employer, which means it gets worse workers. You already think the government is badong, so you would find this a feature, not a bug.

Quote:

5. Eduardo Zambrano
"Formal Models of Authority: Introduction and Political Economy Applications"
Rationality and Society, May 1999Joel Fried
Pots and Kettles: Governance Practices of the Ontario Securities Commission

The first one is taken out of context and the second is meaningless hand waving. Actual data on the matter disagrees. Universal healthcare works just fine in practice, so there is no hypothetical argument that can overturn that observation.

But let's take your preferred method of everyone being responsible for his or her own health care through cash. I'm even willing to ignore where this puts the mentally handicapped and children. How would people with health issues even gain insurance at any cost? Well they wouldn't by market forces so either it's provided to them by government, they die, or government regulates so that insurance providers still must accept such people. But how can insurance companies still make a profit at this? Well that would be by having a large enough risk pool to make up for it. Well a lot of people wouldn't purchase insurance for themselves if they weren't 'violenced' into it by the big nasty government, so the government would have to do that too. They would have to mandate it. I never took you for an Obamacare support Malcolm.

Quote:

6. False.

It's substantially true if slight hyperbole. I've never seen you argue otherwise besides when pinned down by accusations. You've always, to my knowledge, led every argument you've presented as the government doing something wrong, having a hand in something wrong, being 'violent', or market forces being better than whatever other force is being discussed. It could very well be that these are the only times you feel compelled to write anything. However, it's hardly my fault for observing that it's the overwhelming position you take on these boards; money good, government bad.

Quote:

7. It is. Government threats of interpersonal violence can suppress free lance dealers in violence. Also (see Zambrano, above), a government may usefully standardize some interactions, such as rules of the road, standardized weights and measures, and so on. A government can also suppress anti-social activity where privatization is impractical, such as airborne pollution or protection of migratory species. I have never said otherwise. Tyr grossly misrepresents my position.

Tyr represents your gross position accurately. You reduce the meanings of words to absurd levels which makes them meaningless. They are worthless as descriptors when you do such.

Government does not primarily operate on threat of violence. Primarily it operates on the consent of the governed. To be part of society we agree to abide by rule even when we don't personally agree with them. In order to assure stability and compliance with the social contract, we authorize force be used against us as a tertiary mechanism when reasoned compliance fails. For this to be 'operating on interpersonal violence' then all interaction would have to operate on violence. If I start a club and I don't want to let you in, when it comes right down to it the only way to keep you out is threat of violence. If a company wants to not pay it's workers, the 'only' thing, the last line, compelling them to do so then is 'violence'. If you want to trade something, like gold, for some food, the only thing making the trade ultimately then is 'violence'. Now that's your use of the word anyway. In reality violence of any sort rarely enters into the picture. Reasoning is all that's needed most of the time.

It's been two-hundred plus years, but the founding fathers were still pretty on about that one. The power to govern derives primarily not from violence, your use or the real meaning, but from consent of the governed. Why? Because that's what we agreed to.

If you don't like it go buy an oil rig 200 miles off coast and create your own society/government.

[The Dark Lord]

Originally Posted by tyr_13

Market forces led to employee health insurance yet you argue against it and still manage to blame the government for it.

I don't know how true this is. Congress certainly encourages employer provided health insurance by making it not taxable. Neither employer nor employee pays on taxes on what the employer spends on health insurance like they would if the employer just paid the employee more money instead.

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by tyr_13

Originally Posted by Malcolm Kirkpatrick

I'm opposed to government agencies compensating employees in anything but cash, for the sake of budget transparency. This policy would also make health insurance more portable if employees bought their own.

There are many reasons this is a bad idea. One of the main ones is it makes government a less attractive employer, which means it gets worse workers.

Whether straight cash compensation would make a government job less attractive that a mix of cash, government-funded health insurance, and retirement benefits would depend on the amount of cash and on the mix. Straight cash certainly makes the real cost to taxpayers more obvious.

[tyr_13]

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

I don't know how true this is. Congress certainly encourages employer provided health insurance by making it not taxable. Neither employer nor employee pays on taxes on what the employer spends on health insurance like they would if the employer just paid the employee more money instead.

That's true, but that isn't what made Wells Fargo obligated to help pay for medical insurance. 'Encouraged', yes. But even with this encouragement, many, many business don't offer it. And before this encouragement businesses offered it (if memory serves). The idea of health insurance as an employee benefit isn't a 'government mandate'.

Malcolm wanted to know why they were obligated to provide him with insurance. The simple answer is that they agreed to. Yes, I'm betting the tax break on it helped them agree, but am unconvinced that it constitutes the major reason or any arm twisting. They still could have declined to make that offer. Regardless of if they made the offer because of the tax break or not, they were obligated to follow through with the offer because that's what they agreed to.

[RandFan]

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

A large corporation firing employees to avoid paying for healthcare in addition to being an evil thing to do is not something that is known to happen all the time and is news.

Again, this ISN'T my argument (you just can't quit with the straw man).

But I reject you assertion and it is an argument by assertion fallacy. Shark attacks were regular events for decades and one year they were at the top of the headlines. The notion that previously unreported events must become news is absurd. They are more likely too become so but there is no guarantee that they would at any given time. What news organizations report on and what people give a damn about are fickle.

But I'm grateful for you copying and pasting all of my arguments and highlighting key statements. I stand by them. Nothing in what I said indicates that I was talking about a plan by Wells Fargo or any other business to save money on health expenditures by firing workers. Nothing you've posted or highlighted changes that. My argument was simply that these are the kinds of decisions companies make. How often to the fire people to avoid paying health care payments and how well they do that to avoid bad PR is something you DON'T KNOW but only make assertions about and appealing to intuition (yours). Mine is very different.

Quote:

And you're bias free.

I've already conceded multiple times that I have a bias and I've conceded that my position could very well be informed by my bias. I don't deny it for one moment. That's why I try to avoid the kind of airy fairy appeal to intuition arguments that you are making. It's too damn easy to make ad hoc arguments simply to rescue a POV.

[The Dark Lord]

Originally Posted by RandFan

Again, this ISN'T my argument (you just can't quit with the straw man).

I was just saying how it was different from the things you listed.

Quote:

But I reject you assertion and it is an argument by assertion fallacy. Shark attacks were regular events for decades and one year they were at the top of the headlines. The notion that previously unreported events must become news is absurd. They are more likely too become so but there is no guarantee that they would at any given time. What news organizations report on and what people give a damn about are fickle.

Somehow I am doubting very much that that year was the first time shark attacks were reported in the media.

Quote:

But I'm grateful for you copying and pasting all of my arguments and highlighting key statements. I stand by them. Nothing in what I said indicates that I was talking about a plan by Wells Fargo or any other business to save money on health expenditures by firing workers. Nothing you've posted or highlighted changes that.

Wasn't intended to. It was intended to show that you believe they could do it without it getting out. Because you denied that was your belief for some reason.

Quote:

My argument was simply that these are the kinds of decisions companies make. How often to the fire people to avoid paying health care payments and how well they do that to avoid bad PR is something you DON'T KNOW but only make assertions about and appealing to intuition (yours). Mine is very different.

OK. I think your intuition is very poor.

[RandFan]

Originally Posted by The Dark Lord

OK. I think your intuition is very poor.

Okay, I think yours is much, much worse.

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by Skeptical Greg

Originally Posted by RandFan

Story is looking weak.

Really..

Never mind.