Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I took your number of 1/2 as truth, went through the numbers, and... our worker in Des Moines makes about 5k a year more than the one in Berlin. It'd still take 12 years to pay off the person above's unexpected medical expenses. That's probably quite accurate. But most people don't have a $60,000 unexpected health expenditure before they're eligible for Medicare at 65. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5…
I'm sure that as you say it works out for most people on a purely rational game-theory economic sense but I would definitely chose 100% coverage over an extra $5k/year. The whole system (not just health care) seems so stressful and antagonistic in the US. If I had an extra $5k/year I'd probably just spend it on meaningless consumption like a bigger TV or a better car, where as not having to give a second thought abou…
We do. The median house in the US is twice as big as in Germany or France. We have 50% more cars per person than Germany and almost twice as many as France. Even excluding healthcare (to exclude the effect of inflated healthcare costs in the US), per person household consumption spending is 50% higher in the US than France, based on OECD data.