[Noisebridge-discuss] Having an "unemployed employer" for insurance purposes

Sai Emrys noisebridge at saizai.com
Thu Mar 25 18:50:12 UTC 2010


This idea is so obvious to me that it seems like someone really ought
to have tried it by now but I've not found such... so if it's been
done before, please say so and point out how it went.

But...

Right now, insurance is handled through employers as what is
essentially a matter of collective bargaining leverage. You get a
better deal (and get around them needing to care who any individual
is, thereby circumventing any 'preexisting condition' type issues*) by
having a group.

But to do this, you have to have an employer. To me this seems a bit
strange; employment and collective insurance bargaining are
functionally completely unrelated.

So, what if we had a corporation whose sole purpose (albeit not
necessarily one that needs to be disclosed to insurance companies) is
to be a wrapper organization around unemployed or self-employed people
(its "employees"), which provides exactly the same kind of insurance
coverages that good companies give (including any tricks that make it
overall cheaper for "the employer" to write the check to the insurance
company), but with an employee / ownership / whatever contract that
essentially makes it so that everyone pays their share of the costs?
(Perhaps, e.g., the corporation is designed to make a loss, everybody
is "paid" $1/yr as an "employee", while simultaneously being an equal
shareholder and who pays off their share of the corporation's
"losses".)

It'd be a neat hack of the corporation system. I'm not sure what
ramifications it'd have in terms of tax, etc. purposes to have a
negative-income "job", but there might be something interesting on
that front as well.

It could have other uses, e.g. where you for some reason need to be
affiliated with an utterly generic company.

Thoughts?

- Sai

* yes I know the health care bill supposedly addresses this, but
that's just meant as an easy example of individual vs collective
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