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No way Americans pay more in taxes than most of Europe. That's absolutely not true. If you want to compare to third world countries, I suggest you try and live

No way Americans pay more in taxes than most of Europe. That's absolutely not true. If you want to compare to third world countries, I suggest you try and live there before telling us how great it is. You also have to consider that the US develops most novel drugs and therapies, by a wide margin. Are you taking and Chinese or Russian or African drugs? Neither do I.

ceejayoz 9y ago
You can't compare Europe's total taxes with just American healthcare costs. They've made similar choices to pay for stuff like college via taxes instead of privately that heavily affect that comparison. Americans pay more than Europeans (and anyone else in the world) for healthcare. This is demonstrable fact. edit: Here, look at this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expenditure_p... We're paying as much or more than most of the OECD in healthcare from a tax perspective, then adding on a bunch of private spending they don't have, for a total spending wildly larger than any of them.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  Yes, but you're paying less taxes. So it's not as broken as people try to present.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    As far as healthcare is concerned, we pay about the same amount of taxes as Europeans, plus more to private insurers/hospitals, for a total healthcare spending significantly larger than theirs. We also have worse outcomes for all that extra spending - stuff like life expectancy, child mortality, etc. I call that a broken system. Your continued attempts to conflate total taxes with healthcare spending are either silly/odd or deliberately intellectually dishonest, as we'd have to factor in every other variable between us and Europe in that comparison - road funding, foreign aid, military spending, college costs, social welfare programs, etc.

ceejayoz 9y ago

You can't compare Europe's total taxes with just American healthcare costs. They've made similar choices to pay for stuff like college via taxes instead of privately that heavily affect that comparison. Americans pay more than Europeans (and anyone else in the world) for healthcare. This is demonstrable fact. edit: Here, look at this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expenditure_p... We're paying as much or more than most of the OECD in healthcare from a tax perspective, then adding on a bunch of private spending they don't have, for a total spending wildly larger than any of them.

bufferoverflow 9y ago
Yes, but you're paying less taxes. So it's not as broken as people try to present.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  As far as healthcare is concerned, we pay about the same amount of taxes as Europeans, plus more to private insurers/hospitals, for a total healthcare spending significantly larger than theirs. We also have worse outcomes for all that extra spending - stuff like life expectancy, child mortality, etc. I call that a broken system. Your continued attempts to conflate total taxes with healthcare spending are either silly/odd or deliberately intellectually dishonest, as we'd have to factor in every other variable between us and Europe in that comparison - road funding, foreign aid, military spending, college costs, social welfare programs, etc.