Mostly, from what I have seen though, boss gets frustrated-> work environment suffers -> when cuts have to be made, person who boss can't reach at a moment's notice is the first to go.

Yup.

Even worse if you're freelance and can't get reached immediately. They'll simply call the next person on the list and you're SOL.

I've gotten so spoiled by texting. My cousin was here for the weekend, from Toronto, and has no texting plan. And we were constantly having to do BART pick-ups, etc, which required calling for any updates/changes that could have been handled with one word via text. I can't believe how quickly I've gotten used to texting and how much more I loathe making calls.

I haven't yet had a boss who expected me to be able to deal with work stuff whenever. At least not regularly -- I think my current boss has reached out to me twice outside of working hours/days, and she's the first one to really do that. I guess I've been lucky.

Current company pays for my BlackBerry. Previous company did not pay for my cell, but also did not use it often (but did require to have the number for work purposes). I would not work well in an environment that required 24/7 access and actually acted on that. It would take a lot of benefits to have me on call like that.

My mom would have died long ago if she hadn't had fantastic retirement health coverage combined with her Medicare. She made the choice for palliative care and received fantastic treatment. It was HER choice, before hearing all the options from the doc.

I think I'm gonna step away for a while.

I argue that, gee, it's nice for this ONE GUY to have the luck to have such a generous, employer paid (and government subsidized) insurance plan but what happens when his retirement health benefits run out? What if he hits his lifetime cap for coverage? He's not going to be able to get private insurance because he's got cancer. Oh, that's right, he'll shift to Medicaid! In the mean time, hundreds of thousands of children in this country end up in ER for their primary healthcare and have never seen a dentist, even though their parents work hard and pay taxes.

And I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be dead in Canada, England & France.

I agree that bosses expect to be able to find you, but I think that in NYS if you are a non-exempt employee, they need to pay you for the time on the phone.

I really think it depends on the boss. When I worked in events, I had bosses who wouldn't expect for me to deal with work outside of hours except when event was in final planning or going on.

My boss now, in finance, has only tried to reach me twice out of normal work hours.

I'm sorry if the conversation is upsetting, Suzi. I just hate having all this anger and not knowing what to do with it. Yelling at the TV only gets you so far.

My point is that 1)a lot of people arguing against health care reform are terribly afraid that they will have to pay so that people somewhere doing something they don't approve of will get care and 2) a lot of the things they think are frivilous expenses are not.

yeah, I don't really approve of old men getting insurance to cover viagra. where are the people protesting that?