If you lose your job, your access to healthcare is practically nonexistent. Its too expensive for the majority of people, and if you have any major issues, you have to choose between life long debt or ruining your health (or possibly death)
Good question. I think of it as being a gap to the social safety net. Imagine something bad happens to you (you get long covid, you get hit by a car, you get cancer, etc…) and it affects your performance at work (very likely if it’s serious), then you end up losing both your job and your health insurance right when you need it the most.
Now imagine that at scale. We get another pandemic, but worse than COVID (essentially guaranteed to happen again eventually). Lots of people get sick, lots of layoffs from a collapsed economy, now we have millions of people with no healthcare right at the exact moment everyone is at highest risk of getting very sick. This happened at a small scale with covid, it was the highest unemployment rate in decades at the same time people needed healthcare the most.
So you could lose your job due to no fault of your own and face the worst hiring market in history since everyone else did too, be at very high probability of getting a deadly disease that requires expensive treatment, and have no healthcare, even though you did everything right.
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u/ClaudeVS 1d ago
r/orphancrushingmachine Having insurance tied to your work is awful