[snapplebobapple]

Those don't exist because of unintended (but obvious) consequences of government regulation. For all sorts of reasons the risk and cost profile is pretty similar per employee whether they are 20 hours a week or 60 hours a week (non exhaustive examples: health insurance costs me the same to provide no matter how many hours an employee works. Depending on your regulatory regime certain payments like pensions/unemployment are capped so more workers earning less can actually cost more than less workers earning more, firing regulations makes more employees riskier because the probability you hire junk you can't get rid of or an employee turns to junk and you can't fire is higher with more employees, etc.) Since there is a very real cost with what you want your skill set has to be scarce enough to make the added cost worth incurring. As long as I can hire someone that will work full time for similar hourly equivalent pay, the part timers will not be seriously considered.

[mcv]

Health insurance being dependent on your employment, is a whole problem on its own. Of course these things need to be arranged differently, ajd with more freedom for the people themselves.

That said, I recently opted for a 40 hour work week for the first time in decades because otherwise this job is too big a step back in income.

[snapplebobapple]

Health insurance is complicated and I think it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying). I think it's more accurate to say the cost for service is way too high in general, and we are missing out on network effects and efficiency gains by not providing healthcare to some and/or no not providing enough healthcare soon enough to some (and by providing too much healthcare to some too soon).

Under that problem statement, it makes a lot of sense for a large subset of healthcare (i.e. the routine or semi routine stuff like emergency services, family doctor routine visits, many common diseases, especially childhood diseases, routine dental, drugs for these diseases, etc) to be single payer (i.e the government) as long as the government is very proactive and flexible in crushing those costs through its multiple available levers.

I see more of a role for private insurance for the rarer stuff where the cost/benefit to society of society paying isn't as obvious and the optional stuff (ie treatments that have a generic option and a newer drug that is more effective, cover the generic, let people buy insurance if they think they want access to the expensive latest and greatest). There is pretty clearly a role for private and public providers of healthcare in both the government single payer and the private insurance role as well.

[mcv]

> it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying)

These are two completely different situations, and the first is absolutely a problem. It means you lose your health insurance if you get fired, and indeed that working part-time may not be feasible.

The efficiency of the system is a separate issue (but also definitely an issue).

[snapplebobapple]

They are not different. They are linked. Who is paying only matters because the item is arbitrarily too expensive for the person to just pay on their own.

[mcv]

Of course they are different. It's easy to lose your job. From what I understand, there are even countries where you can be fired while sick. And then you lose your health insurance exactly when you need it most.

Losing your nationality is extremely rare. The two cases couldn't be more different.