251–260 of 534 posts
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Doctors? Seems to be a huge reluctance for anyone in politics to place the blame on them. But I'm pretty sure they make far more in the US than anywhere else in the world.
And they pay huge amounts of their income to malpractice insurance. Hmm. There's that word "insurance" again.
I moved to the US from a country with socialised medicine. When you include premiums then taxes in both were roughly similar if not a little higher in the US (ignoring cost of living differences). But even that doesn't include the real sting on the tail of US medicine. You pay a fairly high health insurance premium, but if you actually need health services you then pay again through the nose even with insurance "disc…
Can't even find out what stuff costs beforehand either. I had to get a blood test. I had gotten burned before where my insurance said they covered a physical, but it turns out their definition of a physical didn't include the doctor's definition, which included blood tests. So before I had my blood drawn, I asked them to tell me what the tests would cost if my insurance didn't cover it. "It depends on how it's coded,…
Individual US tax payers pay for most of the world's security. This is one tax of being the global super power, so it's not particularly surprising that when you include all things the US tax payer pays for privately that is taxed in other countries, you arrive at a number higher than other similar countries. In reality, there is no country with which we can fairly compare US tax rates.
Individual US tax payers pay for the largest military budget in the world - I think stating that the US's military budget equates world security isn't a fair jump. Also, bear in mind that a good chunk of that money just gets cycled into politicians via the DOD -> defense contractors -> lobbying.
You do have half a point, though, because the lobbying leads Congress to fund projects that, if one were trying to efficiently run a military, one would not fund.
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I wonder if 10 thousand is a lot for undergraduate education to a German, or Austrian, or French person? EDIT: Doh! Just checked the cost of undergrad in some of those nations. Umm, Yeah. I guess if I were a German or French guy, I'd likely find tuition levels in the US a bit outrageous.
In the Swiss system (as I understand it) it's about $600 to attend classes, but if you don't hit the minimum on the semester exams twice, then you're done in the country . If you miss it the first round then there is a massive incentive to transfer or find an easier program, otherwise you face the prospect of being forced to go abroad to complete a degree.
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My family in Germany throws a fit when they have to pay 50 Euro for something. In the US you can happy if your cost for seeing a doctor is less than 4 digits.
> In the US you can happy if your cost for seeing a doctor is less than 4 digits. My wife and I have never paid four figures for a doctor visit, despite having two surgeries (one oral), a calf strain, and a dislocated shoulder (with ER visit) between us. The state of medical care in the US is bad enough as it is; you don't need to make up hyperbolic bullshit to make it seem worse.
I guess I shouldn’t have gotten injured on a federal holiday.
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There's literally no analysis that shows social security completely failing at any point. That's spin you're getting from partisan media, and it's absolutely infuriating the people allow this to persist. In a few years, given no changes, the cash flow will go negative and we'll begin spending down the trust fund. By 2035 or so (I forget the numbers, and the projections tend to vary widely anyway because of differing…
The trust fund is an accounting fiction that doesn't hold any economically productive assets. Congress spent social security's surplus in the general budget and issued special obligation bonds in return that accumulate "interest" on paper but do not ever collect from the government. They cannot be sold on the market. Taxes or debt needs to be raised or benefits need to be cut effectively now. This is from a 1999 OMB…
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Yeah, and cost of health insurance in Austria is just 7,65% of your income, and it covers your children. When I've worked in the US, I've paid just as much for health insurance and still had high out-of-pockets and deductibles on top of that.
For me it's the opposite. I moved from Denmark to the US, and I pay around $400 in health insurance premiums (health, eye, and dental) for a whole family. In Denmark, only health is covered, so for eye and dental many go out-of-country to get it cheap. The US is much cheaper for all health insurances, except if your poor. Obama tried to fix that, but made it worse and more expensive for everyone (socialism).
My health alone is $2,100/month for a family of four. I suspect your employer is paying a large portion of your premiums as a benefit.
This is quite common in the US, and a significant portion of the problem, as people think they're getting great insurance "cheap". They're not - it's just being paid in a way that's not visible. As a result, any discussion of "it'd be cheap to implement national healthcare, it'd only cost $X" is met with "but I pay peanuts for mine now!"
I moved to the US from a country with socialised medicine. When you include premiums then taxes in both were roughly similar if not a little higher in the US (ignoring cost of living differences). But even that doesn't include the real sting on the tail of US medicine. You pay a fairly high health insurance premium, but if you actually need health services you then pay again through the nose even with insurance "disc…
> But even that doesn't include the real sting on the tail of US medicine. You pay a fairly high health insurance premium, but if you actually need health services you then pay again through the nose even with insurance "discounts." That's mostly not true if you have an HMO plan, but your employer may not offer HMO plans if it offers insurance, the HMO may not be a good one if it is available, or it may not cover goo…
Like to bring this up when we talk taxes: I think it's totally crazy that we give the feds 25% or more and our states soo soo sooooo much less. I think it should be the other way around: 5% for the feds, and maybe 20% to the states. The reason is that our cities are filled with bums, and have absolutely no money to either give them jobs or make new programs. The feds don't give a shit and are busy making missiles or…
In Sweden, until you hit ~$65,000 in yearly income, all of the taxes you pay on income (which is a relatively high rate) goes to your local government. Only after that point, your extra income goes to the federal government. [1]
This model cuts out the immensely large federal government which serves as a middle-man for distributing the income you contribute to your local community, while simultaneously sucking out so much of it— either siphoning it to federal causes, or people's salaries chipping away at it as it's sloshed around.
It's much more efficient when the majority of your income taxes support your local community directly. In the U.S. right now, these localities rely on property taxes, which is _much_ smaller of an income stream. People supporting the Scandinavian model should understand that this is necessary, and that's even more true when your country is larger.
[1] https://www.nordisketax.net/main.asp?url=files/sve/eng/i07.a... Heard this point from Swedish family and having trouble finding it online, but the typical municipality income tax is 29-34% and corresponds to equivalent tax deductions from federal taxation, which seems to effectively have the same (or near same) result.