261–270 of 534 posts
The inevitable Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax#/media/File:Payrol...
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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.
As mentioned above, a problem is that the system is so opaque, seemingly by design. A potential benefit of a government run system is that there could simply be fewer business entities. For instance, doctors could just work for the government, for a decent salary.
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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).
If you're poor in the US, insurance is free. It's the lower middle class and middle class who are frequently bankrupted by these costs.
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On the other hand, a typical state college is closer to $10,000. Yes, it's not Ivy League, but it does the job.
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.
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Did you pay the bill outright without negotiating?
Yes. I couldn’t find an angle to negotiate with. I could afford to pay, so trying to use hardship as a lever to bring down the bill wouldn’t have been honest.
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It wasn't worth the cost in Toronto, either, but you didn't care because it wasn't you who paid the cost.
Technically I did, since my taxes pay for it. What I didn't pay for is the overhead of clerical work from two different corporations for mailing me letters informing me of how arbitrarily priced my doctor visit was.
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who are the "wrong people" that massive social programs enrich? Can you give an example? Most of federal spending is medicare, medicaid and social security; which are immensely popular with voters of all kind.
> Most of federal spending is medicare, medicaid and social security... Well, there's also Defense, and then service payments on the debt. Those are the big 3 without question. So "the wrong people" must be in there somewhere? But the real reason we give more to the feds is because if we didn't it would be AWESOME for places like New York, Minnesota, Texas, Delaware, California etc, and TERRIBLE for places like Wisco…
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…
The reason for this is that if one state has better social programs then another and higher taxes the poorest are going to move there, and the high earners are going to move away.
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This doesn't seem to be a major problem for the EU, which has unrestricted internal migration but social programs are administered by the individual member states. The idea that the poor will mass migrate to California and the rich will mass migrate to South Dakota is pretty unrealistic. The poor can't afford to live in California even with social assistance, and the rich don't want to live in South Dakota no matter…
> This doesn't seem to be a major problem for the EU, which has unrestricted internal migration but social programs are administered by the individual member states I might be off the mark here, but from my understanding wasn't unrestricted migration one of the big drivers behind Brexit? Or at least the idea that the "poor countries" were "taking advantage" of the "rich countries"?
It’s true for blue collar workers as well: try hiring a contractor to remodel your house and then watch them leave the job unfinished because they got a better paying gig in UK (that actually happened to a friend of mine)
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,…
If you need emergency care then sure, there isn't time. The vast majority of interactions with the medical system aren't that type of emergency though. People have time to choose the better of two options. They can't decide on better if they don't know the price.
