I think we're mixing up different political topics here.
The one I think you're talking about is the US workers' struggle to defend or increase basic worker rights. Which indeed is a political struggle of workers versus management.
If I'm not mistaken, the Coinbase case is about social justice types of topics like feminism, BLM, trans rights, colonialism, the like.
My point is that positions like Brian's require there to be a clear and bright line between "political" and "not political". I think it's at least slightly easier to draw that line in European workplaces where the nature of employment is not as politically fraught.
Just to take two of your examples: feminism and trans rights. Both have healthcare implications. Your employer controls your healthcare. Should the healthcare provided by your employer cover birth control? Abortion? Conversion therapy? This mix is inevitable.
We might as well call it what it is: troublemakers.
People that are so politically activist at work that they dis-proportionally impact the business. By sowing division, distracting from the work, spoiling morale. And sometimes worse, like stealing data or airing dirty laundry publicly.
I'm not going to touch the morality of it, I'm merely painting the picture of what it is.
There's more companies where this is an issue, Google had plenty such incidents, Basecamp, Facebook, the like.
I can't help but feel like you've made your mind up and aren't interested in listening to any other perspective. Your reply addresses absolutely nothing in the post it's replying to. Perhaps we just leave the conversation here, I don't see it going anywhere fruitful. I wish you all the best.
I'm open to different perspectives but you're not even on topic. Let me simplify it even further: Brian fired the woke.
The thing you're talking about, worker conditions, is not what the article is about. It's not a different perspective, it's an entirely different topic.
If Coinbase employees didn't feel they can weigh in on what their health insurance should cover, I would certainly agree that's a problem, but I'd be very surprised if that's the case. Armstrong's announcement acknowledged that there will be some cases where political engagement is inevitable because it intersects with the company's business. Remember that this position came in direct response to an incident where Coinbase employees demanded that the company publicly endorse a specific political slogan on the topic of police brutality - regardless of how blurry the line is in general, I hope we can agree that Coinbase's business doesn't have much to do with the police.
You can afford pretty much anything you need as a trans person by working a year as a software engineer. Healthcare is bad in the USA? Do medical tourism, they have great doctors overseas.
Medical tourism is not convenient or even guaranteed to be a trusting experience. Two things that would be very important for many high ticket medical procedures.
Why should any insurance cover elective procedures? You could also add things like beauty surgeries, hair transplant, lasik surgeries etc. (I know that EU insurances often cover birth control, but I think that's mostly because it's a drug prescribed by a doctor so it fits into the framework... I don't think it should cover birth control (except maybe for young people before they start working) - that's not insurance, it's just a subscription service so you're better off buying it directly.)
"Elective" in "elective procedure" doesn't mean "optional and potentially frivolous." It just means "not emergent", or put differently it means you won't die if you don't have it right now.
Kidney stone surgery is elective. Cancer resection is elective. Most heart surgery is elective. Most brain surgery is elective.
I assume you're not arguing that health insurance shouldn't cover these things, because that would be extremely foolish. It may, though, be worth acquainting yourself with at least the basic terminology of the field about which you want to argue, because overlooking this point makes you seem as if you don't really know what you're talking about.
To the best of my knowledge, there exists no term in the medical lexicon denoting the category of "interventions 'tomp believes should not be covered in some or all cases by health insurance."
Neither of us is going to convince one another; you very evidently have strongly held opinions about how medicine should be practiced, whereas I know some things about how it is. That being so, I see no point in continuing this line of discussion any further. Should you feel otherwise, I hope you enjoy it.
Ensuring patients are able to access the treatments ordered for them, or at least trying to do that, qualifies as part of the practice of medicine. That's why medical practices have billing departments to deal with insurance on the patient's behalf, rather than requiring cash up front and letting patients figure their own way through the reimbursement process.
The problem isn't that I'm misrepresenting your arguments, such as they are. The problem is that, instead of finding out how this stuff actually works and understanding why it works the way it does, you prefer to continue insisting on your opinions, which are as apparently uninformed as strongly held.
I don't see what you hope to achieve by this save wasting someone time, and my test suite just finished running, so it'll have to be someone else's time from here.
Birth control is prescribed by a doctor for a wide variety of things, including chronic health conditions. If you think insurance shouldn’t cover birth control because it’s consistent, do diabetics also not deserve to have insulin covered, or high blood pressure people their statins?
I'm not sure whether you include trans healthcare among "shouldn't be covered", so here's my 2 cents:
- Most of Europe prescribes hormones upon a medical indication. This leads to bad gatekeeping; I've been told to see 3 different professionals before starting hormones.
- Anecdotally, I'm on grey market hormones while waiting, without any bloodwork - before starting those hormones, I've had suicidal ideations on a daily basis.
- This seems to be backed by data as well: Ideation rates are reported to be 37-83% and attempt rates are reported to be 9.8-44%. [0]
Given the frequent outcomes of depression and suicide, I think it's fair to say that trans healthcare is not optional and should be fully covered.
I'm not arguing about politics, I'm putting in question the whole idea of making voluntary (not sure if that's the correct term - definitely not elective as I was corrected above) medical procedures available through insurance. Insurance is meant for unpredictable and unforeseen exceptional events. Wanting to have beauty surgery, or contraception, or lasik surgery, etc. isn't such. You could still argue that these should be covered by insurance, but that's simply economically inefficient - you're essentially paying for a subscription service, with the middle man taking a cut - why not just buy it yourself?
I see the confusion. American health insurance doesn’t really fit the term insurance as you define it above. I agree, insurance should be for catastrophic events. But in the US, a health plan is expected to cover all your medical expenses, minus co-pays or deductibles. Perhaps there should be a different term for it.
Obviously it is. But for people defending all kinds of status quo, it's a political act just trying to change it. Trying to keep it as it is, it's seen as "normal" or apolitical.
I always hear this argument that the employer controls your health care in the U.S. and it is quite wrong. The employer MAY offer one or more options for a subsidized health care plan in which the employer contributes some or all of the cost of the selected plan. There is zero requirement for an employee to select or use such a plan, and there is absolutely nothing stopping an employee from seeking an alternative plan or additional uncovered treatments through other means available to them.
Maybe there is a point to be made about the overall cost of health care plans being too expensive for an individual to afford without the employer subsidy, but that is orthogonal to "employer control" of healthcare.
> Maybe there is a point to be made about the overall cost of health care plans being too expensive for an individual to afford without the employer subsidy, but that is orthogonal to "employer control" of healthcare.
No, it's not. A choice in which the alternative is unattainable (or simply worse) is a Hobson's choice, and the direct result is that Americans with full-time employement are dependent on employer-subsidized healthcare.
The one I think you're talking about is the US workers' struggle to defend or increase basic worker rights. Which indeed is a political struggle of workers versus management.
If I'm not mistaken, the Coinbase case is about social justice types of topics like feminism, BLM, trans rights, colonialism, the like.