> They notice how much they're paying and being paid, but they lack the information to know how much they would be paying or being paid in the alternative. So they think they're getting "free" insurance when they're really getting insurance instead of a cost of living increase.
When I lived in NYC, I talked to a lot of Uber drivers and cab drivers. Many Uber drivers are cab drivers and have been cab drivers. They're quite capable of making the comparison.
> You're assuming that the problem is caused by which insurance company the employer chooses and not that it is difficult to accurately detect insurance fraud without using invasive methods, so all the insurance companies charge rates that exceed the value of the insurance and the companies only buy it at that price because it's required by law.
No, I'm simply ignoring the possibility you're bringing up, because it's no less a problem for individuals buying their own insurance. This is just a red herring.
> There are two options here. One is that the money comes from somewhere. The other is that it doesn't, the cost of the service now exceeds its value, and you lose your job.
But we already know the answer to that. The cost of the service doesn't exceed its value because people payed for taxis for decades before Uber (and in fact, they paid a lot more than the insurance, since medallions were a humongous additional cost).
> Insurance companies compete aggressively on price for all customers. Historically larger buyers had a slight advantage because they could get a discount to account for the lower per-customer acquisition cost of getting many customers at once, but now that insurance is a thing that you buy from a website after comparing prices on the internet, even that is becoming an increasingly negligible advantage.
Alternative hypothesis: insurance companies compete aggressively on advertising for individual customers, which allows them to overcharge because the average person doesn't have the time to find cheaper alternatives. Larger customers can devote more resources to researching so competition is actually more based on price.
> Meanwhile if you buy it yourself you get to choose the policy that you want rather than whatever your employer stuck you with.
Which seems to be very okay with the drivers.