And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.
As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US.
Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor.
Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better).
But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.
The one case where your argument fails is very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US you will end up with worse care.
And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality of care within a reasonable time. But it's nothing close to how good it used to be so for the serious part of my care I went to the far better hospital in Brazil covered by my employer provided insurance.
I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride.
The US does provide better care right now if you are rich or privileged enough to have a job that is in demand. But a well funded NHS is a far better system if the political will to get back to that exists.
> I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride.
I am not sure that is the case? The country seems to have a weird obsession with the NHS and seems to downplay/overlook its problems. Frankly even before its recent woes, I found it pretty shit compared to socialized healthcare in France.
The current state of the NHS should prompt riots, yet everyone seems complacent in seeing their literal lifeline being destroyed by greedy, incompetent & senile oligarchs.
There's "catastrophic injury/health" insurance in the U.S. You just don't get it by default. I did a bit of research into the topic in the past and my takeaway is that if you buy the right insurance packages you get pretty much the same coverage in the U.S. that you'd get here (Germany) except you have the option not to do it. From what I gather it's also not that much more expensive, I'd argue the quality of care in the U.S. is probably better (it's pretty high in Germany but the U.S. is probably the #1 in the world on average) and the service quality for someone with this kind of insurance package is better for sure (longer waiting times in Germany for certain procedures/issues for example). All of this is assuming you're lucky enough to have a decent job/salary (which we are as tech people).
I guess it looks more grim for the "lower end of the spectrum" in the U.S.
Hot-take: It's an emotional defence mechanism: on-the-whole the UK and US are far too similar and integrated that it's natural for middle-class Brits to larely consider themselves peers, and not near-peers, of their US counterparts - so when you have that view of yourself and your place in the world but then look at the stark the income disparity, you're going to comfort yourself with all of the bad things about the US (and the US' bad things are legion) - and invoking the egalitarian NHS happens because the UK gets its impression of the US healthcare "system" (industry?) from things like Michael Moore's Sicko or Times columnists reporting on all the messed-up healthcare injustices that happen in the US - but there is a very real ignorance of what healthcare is like in the US when the system does actually work well for you.
And if it isn't NHS vs. "doesn't &everyone* get medical-bankruptcy?" then it'll be about guns, or the death penalty, or overt racism in the south, or corporate america's excesses, or US foreign-policy, and so on. Because those are the things that Channel 4 will report on - but you won't see or read stories that upset anyone's feelings on their place in the world: and it works on everyone: I've already mentioned Guardian-reading types, but also and especially the Brexit-types: who still desperately want to believe the British empire could be brought-back because the Daily Express told them so.
I agree you need to consider total compensation. It's still not even close though.
The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be.
The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.
And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
All US employers I've worked for included disability and long-term injury insurance as standard benefits, in addition to always offering the best-tier health-plans (from non-profit insurers too). Unemployment insurance is another (legally mandatory) benefit that outshines whatever I'd get in the UK because it isn't considered a public-benefit (i.e. it's not the state or Feds paying it ("welfare" as yanks call it), it's still a insurance pool model where the payouts are proportional to your salary and not some arbitrary income limit the DWP set for the year, nor is means-tested or requires me to use-up my savings first - so in WA ( https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit ) I'd be getting about $4k/mo for 6 months, for comparison I quickly ran the numbers on benefits-calculator.turn2us.org.uk (there's no official UK calculator, wat) just now and got... £300/mo - and that's only after I exhaust all my savings first. (To be fair, I could just purchase private unemployment insurance in the UK too, except I'd be paying for it myself out-of-pocket (though it might be a tax-deductible expense?) whereas in WA employers are required to pay into it at no cost to the employee, IIRC).
It eventually runs out. The US healthcare system can eventually bankrupt you no matter how careful you are, if your health problems are serious enough.
I don’t know about Facebook, but at other BigTechs we were offered very affordable short and long term disability plans. And if your income is low enough (e.g. laid off or fired), you qualify for ACA health plans with huge subsidies making it almost free.
That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.
Facebook very probably has a group long-term disability insurance policy which adequately its employees in that case. Google did when I worked there many years ago. Some supports might also come from Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and loans or withdrawals from retirement accounts that are far better funded at Facebook US than at Facebook UK.
It eventually runs out, yes, but the good long-term disability policies last until retirement age, when social security retirement benefits kick in. You may be confusing it with a short-term disability policy, which is more common, or with mediocre long-term policies.
Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits, not even those with career-ending disabilities. You’re underestimating the inequality of benefits within the US.
Not a permanent work stoppage example, but here is one relevant anecdote: I have personal knowledge of someone who got severely crippled by a freak accident that would have made most Americans go bankrupt and never be able to work again, including a need for repeated brain surgery. His FAANG employer benefits paid for what he needed, and although he was permanently wheelchair bound, he was eventually even able to return to work part-time (of course not initially) because of how good their benefits are.
I don’t have statistical data, but I have worked at one of those companies in the past and am familiar with the caliber of compensation and benefits, so I’m generalizing from firsthand knowledge.
Honestly, even the comp allows building savings so rapidly that it helps a lot even before considering the benefits - and one of the benefits, at least at Google, was by far the best 401(k) plan I’ve ever heard of, including allowing less common options in the law which most plans don’t want the administrative hassle of allowing, and lower expenses than retail investing. So personal wealth (and therefore defense against high medical bills) grows really fast at those companies, and then the benefits most allow the employees not to spend those savings on medical costs.
Dismiss my assertions if you like, since they indeed aren’t statistically proved. But I don’t think there’s likely to exist public statistical data either proving or disproving my claim, so assertions like mine are the best we have. Any private data that might exist with sufficiently tailored scope would be kept within the HR department of Facebook or Google, and I’ve never seen it.
I should also probably clarify that I’m talking about US technical or managerial/executive full-time employees and not, say, someone who works in a warehouse shipping Google Store phone purchases, or employees with a foreign comp and benefits package.
But once he/she has a family (or just a pregnant partner) he/she is really handcuffed to the job by that perk, no? The risk of losing that cover makes it very difficult to make sensible life choices.
Is your claim that a Facebook engineer would have trouble finding a different job with high compensation and great healthcare? That's a bold and hard to believe claim.
But answering you on the merits: it’s entirely possible, yes.
For example, what if sensible life choices include moving out of state to a place where there is less tech industry? Just changing jobs can interrupt healthcare and cause costs. And the process of switching providers is, in the experience of a friend with a family with complex healthcare needs, sometimes so kafkaesque it might not be worth the risk.
What if sensible life choices involve blowing the whistle or just being critical of the industry? Can you risk it?
What if sensible life choices mean wanting to substitute time so your partner can go back to work? Does their plan match yours for the benefits you’ve both come to rely on?
It’s not unusual at all for people in all sorts of situations and on all sorts of incomes to effectively end up tied to a job by the security of specific features of a workplace health plan.
Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument.
I do wonder if people in the particular FAANG bubbles are just too young and healthy to understand that healthcare plans aren’t just a tradeable, interchangeable perk: once you are really deeply using them, they can get a lot less interchangeable.
Sorry, but you gave no evidence that the average talented person would be handcuffed to a specific company as soon as they start a family. And you especially gave no evidence that they would "lose that cover". That was your original claim.
> This comes across as quite rude, TBH.
Sorry if you saw it as rude, but I was politely asking from my perspective. It's normal to ask folks for evidence backing up their claim when you don't find it believable. How could I have asked my question in a more polite way?
> Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument.
I did. And I failed to come up with an explanation based on my decades of work experience. Healthcare has never chained me to a job even when I had health problems. Pretty much every company offers a healthcare plan. The only thing that ever concerned me was becoming unemployed.
I have been buying health insurance that uses Blue Cross Blue Shield’s network in the US, and in 4 different states with 4 different health insurance companies on east and west coast it did not seem to make any difference.
I have bought them on healthcare.gov, and I have received them from employer, and it all seems to be interchangeable from my experience over the last 10+ years.
The tax differences aren't that big, and they come with other nationalized services in addition to healthcare. Per capita healthcare costs in countries with nationalized healthcare can be 50% less than in the US. So you're getting much better value for your money when you pay taxes for that healthcare.
