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US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

peoplespolicyproject.org

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Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#271

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dkural wrote: post #151
rhacker wrote: post #87

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…

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.

> 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.

If you ask people if they support the abstract idea of having a military so we're not invaded by foreign forces, or having a program to prevent the elderly from dying in the streets, they say yes.

But then you ask them whether social security should send a larger check to a retired Jeff Bezos than a retired firefighter on a fixed income, or the government should spend billions of dollars on equipment the military itself says it doesn't need but the Congressman from the district which is getting the contract to build it says that it does, and the public support for that falls off pretty fast.

And those "features" cause those programs to cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than they need to, which money could otherwise go to infrastructure and schools and tax cuts for the middle class, all of which are also immensely popular with voters of all kinds. But won't happen when the programs absorbing more than three quarters of the total budget are administered in a federal system where the Congressmen are rewarded for bringing home the pork and Florida is an important swing state full of retirees.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#272

Post by dboreham »

tathougies wrote: post #265
mikeash wrote: post #208

Earlier 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

In my experience that doesn't work.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#273

Post by mercutio2 »

tptacek wrote: post #126

Just a quick note that health insurance premiums do not in fact get plowed directly into rents and administrative redundancies; we pay more than Europe (and Medicare) does in administrative costs, but far-and-away the largest components of health care expenditures in the US are in inpatient and outpatient procedure billings (outpatient by a factor of almost 2x inpatient, itself something like 3-4x all administrative…

Agreed! The way countries with cheaper healthcare manage to spend less is by paying healthcare workers much less.

Doctors and nurses in the US are high status. When they lobby against something, it’s hard to win.

When I read people discussing cheaper healthcare, I always go looking for the part where they explain that healthcare professionals will make a significantly lower dollar per hour. I rarely find this discussed.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#274

Post by blindwatchmaker »

Simon_says wrote: post #266
lhorie wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While technically true, that's disingenuous. You paid no additional marginal cost. The incentive structures matter.

GP is not the one being disingenuous.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#275

Post by SkyPuncher »

jimbokun wrote: post #183
analog31 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody's gouging us. Who? Everybody cries poor and points the finger at everybody else. Nobody knows where the money is actually going.

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.

> But I'm pretty sure they make far more in the US than anywhere else in the world.

Yea, but the opportunity cost of getting there is huge. At graduation, most doctors are in the ballpark of $1MM behind where they'd be if they went straight into a professional career.

Also, doctor's salaries only account for 8% to 20% of total healthcare costs.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#276

Post by dboreham »

interpol_p wrote: post #90
vonmoltke wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An emergency room is not a "basic visit".

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*24h. Urgent Care have basic X-ray and will stitch up pretty bad gashes. I have two kids and we've only been to the ER one time when my son was in anaphylaxis. Broken arms, facial lacerations, were handled at Urgent Care.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#277

Post by rayiner »

jimbokun wrote: post #164
morsma wrote: post #130

Earlier 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).

According to the article, workers in Denmark see 26.7% of compensation go to "compulsory payments" including taxes and health care. Workers in US pay 43.2%. Why should I trust your figures over the article? Are you including the "employer contribution" toward your taxes and health care premiums?

Note the figure in the article does not include income taxes, but rather only labor taxes and compulsory payments.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#278

Post by Delfino »

roenxi wrote: post #270
TallGuyShort wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

'You should know the price before you agree to buy the product' seems like such an innocuous principle. Why isn't their broad-based support of it for medical care? 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…

Yeah, this has baffled me before. I remember learning in my Family & Consumer Sciences class about the importance of being an informed consumer. Then, in college I had to get a dental procedure done and I called around to try to find out the price from different dentists and no one could give me any actual numbers. I ultimately just had to pick a place based on reviews and found out the price after the fact with no knowledge of how it compared t other places.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#279

Post by asciident »

jedberg wrote: post #185
rhacker wrote: post #87

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 whole point of allowing people to deduct their state tax payments was to solve exactly this problem. Let the states that want to tax more and provide more social services do so without harm to their citizens. Of course that deduction is gone now, which just further solidifies government power.

Not sure how states taxing more don't harm their own citizens. If I make $100, with 30% federal tax, then I keep $70. If my state raises their tax from 0% to 20%, then I pay $20 to the state, deduct that from my $100 to get $80, and pay $30 on that which is $24. So I keep $56.

Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

#280

Post by Gibbon1 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #258
morsma wrote: post #130

Earlier 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).

> I moved from Denmark to the US, and I pay around $400 in health insurance premiums (health, eye, and dental) for a whole family. 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…

I've noticed that a lot of employers don't tell workers how much they are paying for health insurance. Because for large companies the number gets rolled into a negociated contract.

In my case I do know. My employer pays $930 some a month. My rent used to be $860/month.

The other thing the happens is just because you have insurance doesn't mean that healthcare providers aren't trying to jack more money out of you. Any procedure/service will be up coded to increase your out of pocket share.

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