Ina Steiner EcommerceBytes Blog
News and insight focusing on ecommerce.
by Ina Steiner, Editor of EcommerceBytes.com
Sun Jan 25 2026 00:12:55

Remember When eBay Promised Sellers Healthcare?

By: Ina Steiner

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Some of you may remember when former eBay CEO Meg Whitman promised to offer sellers access to health insurance ("eBay Merchants to Gain Access to Health Coverage," LA Times, 6/23/2002). Others may remember when Etsy partnered with Stride Health in 2015, which promised to make it "quicker and easier to find the right health insurance."

Now a lawmaker has introduced a bill that would give people who work in the "platform-based economy" access to benefits typically reserved for salaried employees, along with other provisions included in the bill's "Creator Bill of Rights."

On one end of the spectrum in the proposed law is a provision to "Ensure that digital workers can easily carry benefits across gigs and platforms, including establishing portable benefit systems and retirement plan options designed for independent workers."

On the other end of the spectrum is a provision to "Require online platforms to offer clear, transparent, and predictable revenue-sharing terms between platforms and creators for the content and labor that generate value for those platforms."

US Representative Ro Khanna said the "creator economy" provides income for 12% of adults and has emerged as a full-time job for over 10 million Americans. In a press release announcing the bill, Khanna said the digital economy was a rapidly growing industry that supported over 200 million creators globally and said:

"Platform-driven work is frequently characterized by unpredictable income, opaque rules, and sudden algorithm changes that can drastically reduce creators' earnings without notice or recourse."

Check out the California lawmaker's Creator Bill of Rights and share your thoughts. Has anything changed since Whitman raised the issue of making health insurance accessible to eBay sellers in 2002? What do you think about benefits and revenue-sharing provisions for small marketplace sellers and gig workers?



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Perminate Link for Remember When eBay Promised Sellers Healthcare?   Remember When eBay Promised Sellers Healthcare?

by: etectra This user has validated their user name.

Sun Jan 25 06:20:40 2026

"US Representative Ro Khanna"

A member of the Democratic Communist Party of America.

What health care related thing is this party most famous for?

Obama Care, which forced existing health care companies to take people with existing conditions who had never paid into company before. So how did health care companies pay for absorbing the massive expenses associated with taking these people? They raised rates. How did the health care companies respond to the government providing subsides that the government took from other people's income via taxes or added to the national debt? They raised rates.

Meg Whitman is a complete fraud! Old time eBayers like myself knew her taking over HP would be a total disaster because ay HP she would not be able to steal every idea like she did at eBay.

Name one thing under watch at eBay that eBay actually invented!

Did not hold the first online of a fixed price product or a auction. In fact, they were even sued to infringing on online patents created by someone else. Did not create any of the underling technology of computers, the internet or software. They did not even create their own API.

Others came up with the idea of hosting images on servers and inserting them into listings via HTML. Others came up with scheduled listings as well as listing software. Even when eBay owned PayPal it was ING Direct, the giant Dutch bank, that did all the actual international transfers for them.

Meg is a parasite!



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