Fair point, I was looking up pay withholding breakdowns and that's all that's directly paid to Medicare.
> Point being it's incorrect, and quite misleading, to assert that 2% of your salary 'is for medicare', as a simple breakdown for public health shows that, per-dollar, it's somewhere in the range of 10-25%
I want to push back on this a little though.
The implication that it actually costs 10-25% of your salary is just as misleading, as individual taxes only account for So maybe a better middle-ground would be to say it costs 5-12.5%? Even then, I'm not sure where you're getting that upper 25% figure from, a cursory search shows _total_ expenditure on health care (medicare + private together) was Looking at the budget, it's ~14% of expenditure [2]
So if we assume that all this money is fungible we could expect that ~7% of my salary, or 8.5% of all tax I ever pay, goes to government health expenditures.
Adding on my private cover and out-of-pocket expenses get me to about 10%, exactly what the OP is claiming they pay...but that was paying for _just_ insurance. The US government still spends huge amounts on health care, so a chunk of their taxes are going there too, and there is the out of pocket expenses etc.
As you say, an exact figure isn't easy to determine. But comparing the 2% medicare levy + my private health insurance to the 10% OP's US insurance cost seems pretty reasonable. They are paying more than that for healthcare out of pocket and their other taxes, so am I. The deal in Australia still seems much better than the US one.
[0] See Table 2: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/3be568f2-d938-4575-bf1f-874...
[2] See appendix B: https://budget.gov.au/2020-21/content/overview.htm#three