Based on the last statistic I heard, something like 46 million Americans don't have health insurance. Many, many jobs in the service sector don't provide it (either because they only provide it to full-time workers and purposely don't give certain employees enough hours to qualify, or they employ contract workers like myself, or can't afford to provide it because they're too small a company, whatever), and many that do offer it only cover part of the cost, making it still hard to afford for a lot of its workers. It used to be much more common for a job to cover all or most of your health-care costs, but now you're lucky if you have that.
Even so, I'd still take a job that's permanent and at least covers a significant portion of the cost of my healthcare over another contract job with almost no benefits any day. Especially since--to answer your question--the pay sadly does NOT compensate in my experience. When I started at Xerox, as an example? I was doing the exact same work as one of my permanent colleagues, but she wasn't a contract employee anymore and thus made over $30,000 a year (I was still making something like $22,000 a year as a non-Xerox employee), had paid vacations & paid sick days (I did not), and only had to pay a little bit toward the premium for her health care--which actually provided proper benefits--while I got next to nothing. The only health insurance I could've gotten through my temp agency would've required paying over $100 a month and would've only covered ONE office visit to a physician in a 12 month period, and then nothing more than that other than something like 50% of emergency hospital care. And then after that it wouldn't cover anything else, but you'd still be required to pay the $100/month for the rest of the year. What's the point? If you were to get sick, it wouldn't help you. You'd still end up bankrupt. It's a freaking scam. Meanwhile your colleague doing the same work as you gets to have totally different pay & benefits simply because she got hired on before the hiring freeze & you didn't.
So, yeah. If I end up broke and need to take another temp job, so be it. But it's definitely a last resort. In this country there's a difference between good healthcare & bad healthcare, and what stands in your way is usually money & how much your job is willing to pay for it. If I were perfectly healthy, I suppose it wouldn't matter. But I'm not, and I can't even tell you how much money I wasted this year alone trying to get help from my doctor because my job wouldn't pay for my healthcare. Yet they still fired me for being absent due to illness. Go figure.
(can you tell this is a subject that gets me going? Hee)
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 06:07 am (UTC)Even so, I'd still take a job that's permanent and at least covers a significant portion of the cost of my healthcare over another contract job with almost no benefits any day. Especially since--to answer your question--the pay sadly does NOT compensate in my experience. When I started at Xerox, as an example? I was doing the exact same work as one of my permanent colleagues, but she wasn't a contract employee anymore and thus made over $30,000 a year (I was still making something like $22,000 a year as a non-Xerox employee), had paid vacations & paid sick days (I did not), and only had to pay a little bit toward the premium for her health care--which actually provided proper benefits--while I got next to nothing. The only health insurance I could've gotten through my temp agency would've required paying over $100 a month and would've only covered ONE office visit to a physician in a 12 month period, and then nothing more than that other than something like 50% of emergency hospital care. And then after that it wouldn't cover anything else, but you'd still be required to pay the $100/month for the rest of the year. What's the point? If you were to get sick, it wouldn't help you. You'd still end up bankrupt. It's a freaking scam. Meanwhile your colleague doing the same work as you gets to have totally different pay & benefits simply because she got hired on before the hiring freeze & you didn't.
So, yeah. If I end up broke and need to take another temp job, so be it. But it's definitely a last resort. In this country there's a difference between good healthcare & bad healthcare, and what stands in your way is usually money & how much your job is willing to pay for it. If I were perfectly healthy, I suppose it wouldn't matter. But I'm not, and I can't even tell you how much money I wasted this year alone trying to get help from my doctor because my job wouldn't pay for my healthcare. Yet they still fired me for being absent due to illness. Go figure.
(can you tell this is a subject that gets me going? Hee)