Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an American living in Ontario, Canada for a time, I literally COULD NOT BELIEVE the gig economy there. It is what the US aspires to: a guy owns a snow plow business, employs 30 other gig workers 6mos a year. A woman does city/house hunting tours. Contractors are consistently self-employed. On and on. These folks, earning enough to live, and (to another commentor’s point) without fear of medical bills/issues. That…
I often wonder about this cost to the US economy due to a lack of universal health care: how much productivity is lost due to people staying in jobs just for health care, how many businesses not started, etc.
The people lauding the wonderful beautified “universal healthcare” (which, btw, they lied to you about never wanting to implement during pre-Obama care con job that made the Health sector rich and the middle class poorer) do t ever actually account all the costs when discussing it, and I will just assume you are doing the same from a point of ignorance, and not intentional deception.
Here is a representative example of a wonderful splendrous worker with universal healthcare in Europe.
1), as surveys here too show, for the same job, you’ll be making about 50-75% the salary of an American equivalent (see following points).
2) Your tax burden on that immensely lower income will be approaching 30% effective income tax (FYI, e.g., the 42% tax rat starts applying at €55,000, just for a reference point … and no, that is not a typo)
3) on that lower income and higher taxes amount, you then get to pay huge retirement taxes too, on the order of effectively approaching 20%, with heart wrenching and soul sucking outcomes when you see the “pension” people are given after a life of paying into an utterly incompetent and failed retirement system. For reference, think of paying into a retirement system at going on 20% of your income and then getting about 1/4 of your salary to live off in “retirement”. It’s sad and sick and immoral. If people had been able to simply invest their own money in a global fund, they would probably be swimming in money in retirement, but instead they were pillaged and plundered in order to give them a pittance in “retirement”. It’s really a morally bankrupted and depraved system.
4) so now that we’ve reduced your already lower income by around 50% from taxes and a con job retirement system, let’s talk about the health care system cost that will run you about €300 per month in employee costs every month just for a single person, not counting the employer contribution of another ~€900; again, for a single individual. And on top of that, you are also going to have copays to see the doctor (albeit about 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost in the USA, so you get to save $5-15), but you also get to go to a doctor for a prescription and a pharmacy to buy things like basic over the counter medications like ibuprofen .… that comes in blister packs of 20 you get “for free”(see tax burden and health insurance costs above for reference of level of “freeness”). Again, no, those are not typos or errors, they are very much representative examples.
4) gasoline is taxed at 100%, in most European countries or more, with talk of increasing it. And no, again, that is not a typo. For reference, in the USA gasoline is taxed at around the 20-25% range. The reason I mention that, is because it’s not only a taxation on mobility, it again sucks the disposable income of the lower income people dry.
And none of that even goes into the fact that medical care is determined by the insurance that pulls typical insurance things where when it’s time to pay out all the sudden the medical care is deemed not necessary.
The saddest thing about the health care cost debate is that it seems to be driven by a con job to trick people into a trap that will enslave them to authoritarian control even more without any benefits from it, if not only more detrimental effects like Obamacare that only served to drive up costs and then peg them at new levels that made health insurance companies and the medical sector richer, while Medicare fraud and pull pushing has run amok.
I actually find it curious that especially this community would not realize that the ideal system is not a centralized monolith running on a con job and no backups, but a highly competitive decentralized system forced to be transparent and accountable. But I guess whatever is driving the centralization of power and control among the tech tyrant FAANGs, seems to have also latched onto people’s minds here maybe.
Please excuse any errors because English is not my first language