Comment by frde_me
3 days ago
> He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.
This really sucks for him. Through should Microsoft _not_ layoff specific people due to health conditions? Is that something we require from companies?
How about you nationalize your healthcare, so people like that are not depended on their work to get the care they need?
Employer provided health care insurance came about during WW2 because Roosevelt froze wages. Companies discovered they could "raise" wages by paying for the insurance themselves.
The practice persisted because employer paid health insurance is tax-deductible, while it isn't if a person pays it out of pocket.
The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.
> The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.
Or make employer paid health insurance count as income and therefore not tax-deductible.
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Or lower the age for Medicare every year until everyone is covered.
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Wouldn’t that leave out the set of people who have no income? For example, long term unemployed, adults switching careers and needing to take a long time off for education, etc? While the solution gets close, I don’t think it’s strictly the same thing. Add on top of that our unnecessarily complicated tax system and this sounds even less equivalent.
I don’t see how this addresses the comment you replied to.
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How about you do some research on the kind of healthcare that people in countries with socialized healthcare receive. 6 month waitlists for a cancer screenings, multi day emergency room waits for broken bones, maybe you've heard of the oh so wonderful death pods in Canada? Our system is by no means the best, but I'll take it any day over socialized systems.
This is not my experience in Canada. It is not the experience of anyone I know. There are often long wait times in ERs for things that are non urgent. I waited 5 or 6 hours my last visit after initial assessment. I’ve known a few people that had life threatening cancers here: they were treated quickly, and compassionately by the health care system. There are bad wait times for some things: a hearing assessment took 6 months (there are private options for this but many people would rather wait - they trust the system more). There is a shortage of family doctors. Medications are not fully covered. But I promise you we have no death pods in our hospitals. If you get hit by a car, diagnosed with cancer, need an X-ray, a breathing test, etc. You get that care. It’s nowhere near perfect, but I’m thankful for it and most people I know feel similarly.
Can you cite the sources you researched? I’ve known people from all over the world and none of them found that to be true: the American healthcare system was commented on in disbelief over both the cost and difficulty of getting treatment compared to where they had previously lived.
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I did: Greece, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Japan and now Norway.
Never paid a single dime out of pocket as a diabetic.
> so wonderful death pods in Canada?
propaganda at it's height.
Yeah, but those systems won’t hide breaking research like checks notes antioxidants and high-dose Vitamin D from cancer patients, so…
Note that a freshly laid off person will usually qualify for generous Medicaid benefits, including in WA state.
What does 'usually' mean? In my experience 'usually' has never worked in my favor. Say it does, does it kick in immediately? What do they have to do to switch over providers? Does all currently being coveraged treatment just move over to being covered by Medicaid automatically or will they need re-approvals?
If you are saying they are covered either way, why not just have consistent healthcare coverage for them and for everyone, all the time?
(Looking at this from an American centric point-of-view):
The Czar of health-care in the US today is a brain-worm addled, drug-addicted, vaccine-denying, conspiracy mongering, incompetent jackass. And the overall current administration has shown itself to be hostile to basically anyone who isn't a cis-gendered, white, heterosexual, Christian male.
How many of us really trust these people to make good decisions regarding our health-care? A position that they (or their delegates) would find themselves in if we "nationalize health care".
I think this is a classic example of an idea that sounds good on paper, but doesn't survive contact with reality.
In the UK, it's operated as trusts separate from day to day government. In Canada it's provincially administered. In Australia, Medicare is a national, tax-funded system with independent statutory authorities overseeing parts of it. Germany, France, Japan have social insurance systems.
I would imagine individual states would manage their own health services, with the federal government acting as more of a coordinating and standard setting body. At least that's how it works in UK, Spain etc.
There's probably no federal agency less related to the issue of nationalized healthcare than the DHHS.
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What role did you specifically play in your country's nationalization of healthcare?
Maybe not that person above, but I’ve continually voted in support of it and initiatives to expand it
Legally, Microsoft, or any company, cannot use any personal factors in determining who to lay off. If they do, they risk a very real lawsuit. All one needs to do is show some evidence of discrimination, and the EEOC doesn't charge a dime, the worst they will do is deny to pursue. If that happens, most private lawyers will take the case on contingency.
This is the reason you see sweeping cuts without regard to age, sex, etc.
There have also been lawsuits in the past that have settled out of court where a company's layoffs appear to overly inflict damage on one class vs. another, even if the intent was not to do that.
I am not defending these companies at ALL btw. I just have a bit of experience in this area due to the legalities, and I wanted to share it.
I am also not saying that companies don't do this, but the smart ones don't, and the smart ones at least try to at least avoid making it look obvious.
> the EEOC
Which—for the folks not following along aghast at everything—has been sabotaged by recent federal political changes.
https://www.epi.org/blog/trump-is-making-it-easier-for-emplo...
> Is that something we require from companies?
In Germany, yes. For mass layoffs, this absolutely has to be considered. In general, the older the employee is, or if the employee has dependents, the more difficult it gets to both fire them or lay them off.
Germany's GDP is shrinking.
The regulations that make it hard to lay off someone have an equal and opposite effect of making companies very reluctant to hire. This impedes the efficient allocation of labor, resulting in a poorer GDP.
It looks like Germany's GDP has increased every year in recent memory except 2009 and 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany#Data
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"The Stupidity of GDP per Capita"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA
How much of this years GDP growth in the USA went to average citizens? What does GDP growth matter if your citizens have zero access to healthcare, can't improve their conditions, can't innovate, can't try new ideas because they are tied to healthcare via their current job?
How much of American GDP growth goes to Billionaires and isn't a useful health metric?
See: Billionaires added record $2.2tn in wealth in 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/31/billionaires-ad...
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I would 100% chose to live in Germany than the USA. GDP is one consideration, but QOL more important.
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It is, but more generally. In many other countries, it is not so easy to lay off employees as it is in the US. It is also not necessary that your access to healthcare be contingent to your employer's whims.
Not at all - it's legal, but it doesn't garner goodwill either.
Yes
Companies don’t have agency. People do. Compassion is a cross cultural value. Including amongst those that run companies.
For the most part none of us has any “required” obligation to anyone else.
Is it something we require of companies? No. But being a responsible, compassionate human being that considers the totality of circumstance is something I expect of that company’s leaders. Especially a company that has the money and need for technical skills elsewhere in the org.
The golden rule does not stop being true just because you are at work.
Preemptively: duty to shareholders is broader than short term profit maximizing. Avoiding bad PR like this is also in the service of MS shareholders.
As a side note: Nadella moved his home to Canada, while working at MS, so his special needs kid could go to a specialist school. That is absolutely the right choice. The argument that MS should not consider the health of their employees children is horseshit when they allow the CEO to set up house hours away in a different country for that exact reason.
At the end of the day, a kid suffered unnecessarily through no fault of his parents or his own.
Yes I’d say that such people should get extra protections
In europe (at least in Germany), they do get extra protection.
And that's why people think 5 times before hiring such. It's already super hard to fire people unless they make gross mistakes. It's nearly impossible to fire someone like that. It's stupid.
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In the US at least, there are needs-based high-risk insurance programs run by states that do just that.
Even so, while it's not a good argument against layoffs, the fact that it's even considered as such is in itself a reasonable argument against health care being tied to specific employment.