The difference is that your taxes go up as you earn more, but your health insurance premiums don’t. Lower middle class workers are getting screwed, but the top earners are doing great! It’s a feature, not a bug.
US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
291–300 of 534 posts
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
An emergency room is a fairly regular visit if you are a parent. I have three young kids and all of them have been to emergency at least a few times — you'll call the government hotline, they'll tell you how urgent it sounds, then you go They don't want anyone to risk staying home with their child if there's a chance that they are in danger This is in Australia and there is no cost for this
I'd be careful you're talking about the same thing as a US ER because there are two other places you can take your kids in an "emergency" in the US that are not called ER: you can go to the kid's pediatrician who will have emergency appointments during roughly the same hours stored are open (e.g. Saturday and Sunday); and there are Urgent Care centers that are usually open late into the evening 7 days or possibly 7*2…
I've been to the ER half a dozen times with my son (reactive airway issues every time he gets a cold). It's totally something we could manage at home, but it took forever to convince our GP to prescribe the necessary meds (she was more comfortable with us going to the ER, despite the cost (both financially and the added stress of packing up a 1 year old to go to the ER)).
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
An emergency room is not a "basic visit".
The greatest trick healthcare companies have pulled is convincing Americans that after hours visits for things like high fevers and broken bones isn't basic care. I'm 40, and my Mom was telling me about how my brother cut his head as a child, and the local small town doctor came in after hours to stitch it up. Different era.
You don't need an ER for any of those things. We already solved this problem with Urgent Care.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess what, private insurance companies will also negotiate prices. What happens in socialized systems is that the government does price fixing , which makes healthcare worse and it limits supply . Try getting a specialist appointment with socialized healthcare in Germany, it can take several months. Get private insurance (or pay out of pocket) and suddenly appointments become available. Doctors are leaving the count…
>>Guess what, private insurance companies will also negotiate prices. They negotiate prices based on the size of the pool. This is why if you are a small business the rates you will get will be worse than if you were a large enterprise. With socialized healthcare, the pool is the entire citizenry, which is what gives the government substantial leverage when negotiating.
The German government doesn't negotiate anything. They set prices, period. Set them too low and you create shortages. Guess what the German healthcare system has, it's a shortage of doctors, especially specialists. German doctors are leaving for greener pastures, like Switzerland. They are replaced by doctors from Eastern Europe. Quality suffers. Waiting times are high. Most Germans are too uninformed or arrogant to admit it (especially to Americans) but the system sucks.
That's not to say the American system is good, but I can't stand all this talk about how socialized healthcare is so great. It isn't. A lot of what people are calling "socialized" systems are actually private systems with a compulsion to purchase insurance, for example Switzerland, Netherlands, Australia. Even Germany technically has a dual system (public and private) but only the top earners are allowed to go private.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Normally you just call and say youd like to lower the bill
Why would they respond with anything besides “fuck you, pay me”?
When I did ask, their response was basically a more nicely worded version of that.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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"If you're Neither of those even resembles a claim that it will "blow up before the end of the Trump administration"
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social Security is so popular that either party trying to cut benefits will be voted out at the next election, especially if the other party runs on restoring it. So instead of cutting benefits to those currently receiving it, instead there will be a call to increase the retirement age. This is already happening in Denmark where the retirement age will be 67 by 2022 and after 2030 could be increased 1 year every 5 ye…
Raising the retirement age is probably the only way to keep things going. People used to retire in their 60s and died in their 70s. Now they live up to 90 and more. Simple math tells us that this is not sustainable.
If we got rid of the income cap on the tax it would make an enormous difference.
Let alone the idea of income over a certain amount having to pay a larger percent...
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hahaha. Sure.
Good luck finding a Medicaid provider.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who cares about the deductible? It’s still a ripoff. You should care about the deductible, cause you entered the contract, silly. Get private insurance in Germany, there's also a deductible, unless you want to pay more. > We went to an eye doctor and paid 25 Euro cash including an ointment. The US is just horribly expensive and very unpredictable. That's because of price fixing (GOÄ). It's all they can charge. And…
In what way is your comment about price fixing relevant? I don't care if the lower price is because of price fixing or not.
Yes, you don't care because you're completely ignorant. How would you feel about your job if I set the price for your wages at 12€/hour?
Price fixing causes shortages and/or lowers quality. I hope you don't have to go to a German hospital and catch yourself some MRSA, or wait months in agony to get an MRI to diagnose your neurological disorder, or get an appointment with basically any specialist. Because that's the reality of German healthcare. Been there, done that (except for the MRSA thing, that only killed a couple of not-so-close relatives).
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, a typical state college is closer to $10,000. Yes, it's not Ivy League, but it does the job.
Including room, board, and books, you're looking at something in the $20,000 range, and it varies a lot by state. If you live in Virginia, for example, undergraduate total cost of attendance for UVA is around $32,000 ( https://sfs.virginia.edu/cost/18-19 ). EDIT: There is also the case where you may live in a state with insufficient opportunities for higher education. For example, neither of North Dakota's two public…
Move!
I didn’t have the grades, legacy or extracurricular activities to get into the Ivy League. I could get into good engineering schools, but couldn’t imagine the debt or bankrupting my parents. So I went to a SUNY school, and everything worked out fine.