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

[Brian Molnar]

Isn't this kinda what the Freelancers Union does?

http://www.freelancersunion.org/insurance/explore/

- Brian

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Sai Emrys <noisebridge at saizai.com> wrote:

> 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
> required signup info
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