6 ms·

This is certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad a startup is caring about its employees like that. "What is your startup's parental leave policy?"

This is certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad a startup is caring about its employees like that. "What is your startup's parental leave policy?" In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that. I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.

yuncun 12y ago
Can I ask what country you are from?
- radicalbyte 12y ago
  Brazil, his LinkedIn is in his profile ;)
yourapostasy 12y ago
In the US, there are chicken-and-egg challenges all over the map that obstruct the adoption of such policies in small businesses. The big challenge is the out-of-control medical costs that pressure policy decisions elsewhere in the decision matrix. A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications. If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state). For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years. But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  > the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) On the topic of distorted costs, I nearly flipped out last night when I got the statement for my recent polysomnogram. The sticker price, if I walked in uninsured, would have been $8750. My insurance company is paying $616, and I am paying $15. I think it is abhorrent that the facility just ignores 93% of the sticker price just because I have insurance. I saw similar massive write-downs on my arm surgery. I imagine a C-section is the same.
  - pc86 12y ago
    Which becomes even more mind-boggling when, if your insurance declines it for whatever reason or there is a problem processing the insurance and it's not caught in time, you get a bill for $6,000 after a "discount." But typically by the time those letters arrive you've already got $1,500 in fees and charges.
    - ashark 12y ago
      The typical billing experience for anything non-trivial in US hospitals is batshit crazy. One visit can generate three or four bills from different people and institutions. Some of these bills they'll tell you to ignore if you call about them because insurance is covering all or part of it, but they sent the bill before that was sorted out, for god knows what reason. Don't worry, you'll get more, corrected (hopefully? maybe?) bills later. Then explanation of benefits letters arrive, which look sort of like bills but aren't. Almost certainly, at least one of the billing people and/or the insurance folks screwed something up and you'll get to spend most of a day on hold with insurance and a hospital or test processing company or whatever sorting it out. If you miss anything in this mountain of mostly-useless paperwork you may find late notices in your mailbox a month or two later. Now you get to try to figure out whether the charges on those late notices were legit, or whether they're the result of some seemingly-alway-incompetent hospital billing department's error. While racing against the date on which it goes to collections, and while fees and such accrue. By four months out you finally, maybe, know what your total costs were/are, after hours of dealing with it and filling half a filing cabinet drawer with documents. Now, consider that most procedures will include several visits generating a similar number of bills in the months leading up to it. You'll being bombarded with this garbage non-stop for months on either side of the Main Event. You'll also have some follow up appointments and/or tests. Fun! Basically everyone involved either doesn't care about doing their job correctly or is actively trying to steal your money. Half the time they don't know WTF is going on. You or your loved ones get to deal with that while you're sick or recovering. We call this health care. Some people prefer to pay a premium for this "service" instead of having single-payer or a national healthcare service because... that would make us less free? That's how bad it is with insurance. Without is, I'm sure, much worse, though probably less complicated.

yuncun 12y ago

Can I ask what country you are from?

radicalbyte 12y ago
Brazil, his LinkedIn is in his profile ;)

yourapostasy 12y ago

In the US, there are chicken-and-egg challenges all over the map that obstruct the adoption of such policies in small businesses. The big challenge is the out-of-control medical costs that pressure policy decisions elsewhere in the decision matrix. A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications. If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state). For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years. But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.

vonmoltke 12y ago
> the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) On the topic of distorted costs, I nearly flipped out last night when I got the statement for my recent polysomnogram. The sticker price, if I walked in uninsured, would have been $8750. My insurance company is paying $616, and I am paying $15. I think it is abhorrent that the facility just ignores 93% of the sticker price just because I have insurance. I saw similar massive write-downs on my arm surgery. I imagine a C-section is the same.
- pc86 12y ago
  Which becomes even more mind-boggling when, if your insurance declines it for whatever reason or there is a problem processing the insurance and it's not caught in time, you get a bill for $6,000 after a "discount." But typically by the time those letters arrive you've already got $1,500 in fees and charges.
  - ashark 12y ago
    The typical billing experience for anything non-trivial in US hospitals is batshit crazy. One visit can generate three or four bills from different people and institutions. Some of these bills they'll tell you to ignore if you call about them because insurance is covering all or part of it, but they sent the bill before that was sorted out, for god knows what reason. Don't worry, you'll get more, corrected (hopefully? maybe?) bills later. Then explanation of benefits letters arrive, which look sort of like bills but aren't. Almost certainly, at least one of the billing people and/or the insurance folks screwed something up and you'll get to spend most of a day on hold with insurance and a hospital or test processing company or whatever sorting it out. If you miss anything in this mountain of mostly-useless paperwork you may find late notices in your mailbox a month or two later. Now you get to try to figure out whether the charges on those late notices were legit, or whether they're the result of some seemingly-alway-incompetent hospital billing department's error. While racing against the date on which it goes to collections, and while fees and such accrue. By four months out you finally, maybe, know what your total costs were/are, after hours of dealing with it and filling half a filing cabinet drawer with documents. Now, consider that most procedures will include several visits generating a similar number of bills in the months leading up to it. You'll being bombarded with this garbage non-stop for months on either side of the Main Event. You'll also have some follow up appointments and/or tests. Fun! Basically everyone involved either doesn't care about doing their job correctly or is actively trying to steal your money. Half the time they don't know WTF is going on. You or your loved ones get to deal with that while you're sick or recovering. We call this health care. Some people prefer to pay a premium for this "service" instead of having single-payer or a national healthcare service because... that would make us less free? That's how bad it is with insurance. Without is, I'm sure, much worse, though probably less complicated.