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There is also corporate tax, and personal tax is assessed at graduated rates depending on income. If their income is low, say ~60k split between husband and wif

There is also corporate tax, and personal tax is assessed at graduated rates depending on income. If their income is low, say ~60k split between husband and wife, they would pay roughly ~0 for health care.

Groxx 16y ago
Corporate taxes come out of paychecks. Unless all that is refunded if that's their income, then they're still paying something for it in addition to their direct monthly bill. It can be carried further: money they get refunded comes out of other areas' funding, as the difference gets made up somehow. Their property taxes go up, the cost of food goes up because others are carrying a heavier burden, jobs across the board pay less / hire fewer, everything always costs something, even refunds. Less in some situations, but not zero. And we're still not reaching $50-$100.
- jbri 16y ago
  And breaking a window stimulates the economy because it means the window-fitter gets more business.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    I don't see how it's possible to have a cost of less than $50-100/month for healthcare. And all forms of cost have to be accounted for - direct + taxes being by far the easiest to measure, but when people start claiming that it "costs nothing" they're ignoring the bigger picture of the economy as a whole. Especially when $60k/year is your bottom margin - that includes a lot of people => a lot of drain on the rest if it doesn't come from them. Nice reply, btw :)
    - jbri 16y ago
      The issue, I think, is that government spending is really in a different boat to private expenditure when it comes to the effect on the economy. Trying to model it as "you spend $X in taxes to pay for that healthcare" is a drastic oversimplification. If you instead look at all government spending as economic stimulus, and all taxation as a factor in inflation management, you get quite a different picture.
- s3graham 16y ago
  But by the "whole system" argument you're making, health care could easily have a negative cost. Let's hypothesize that all the engineers working in SV get an AIDS-like illness caused by spending too much time on news.yc. If there was a health care solution that would make sure that all the employees of Google, Intel, HP, etc. continued to function as usual by caring for those engineers, then even an extremely high up-front cost for that care would result in a net-win for the budget/economy/country. Of course, that's silly as it won't happen to that extreme. But, I don't think the downward-spiral of more-cuts-here-and-there that you describe is the only possible outcome. A positive virtuous-cycle of increased wealth production is also possible.
  - wtallis 16y ago
    Before that positive outcome can have a chance of happening, we have to get rid of the obscenely expensive hopeless palliative end-of-life care (cue teabaggers screaming about "death panels"), and make basic healthcare universally available. The only ways that increased healthcare spending can increase productivity are through effective preventive measures and corrective treatments that return the patient to sufficient health to be productive, but that's not where our super-high healthcare costs come from. They come from the consequences of delayed care (eg. using only emergency rooms when you're uninsured, necessitating more risky treatments for more advanced problems, which means higher malpractice premiums) and from end-of-life care.

Groxx 16y ago

Corporate taxes come out of paychecks. Unless all that is refunded if that's their income, then they're still paying something for it in addition to their direct monthly bill. It can be carried further: money they get refunded comes out of other areas' funding, as the difference gets made up somehow. Their property taxes go up, the cost of food goes up because others are carrying a heavier burden, jobs across the board pay less / hire fewer, everything always costs something, even refunds. Less in some situations, but not zero. And we're still not reaching $50-$100.

jbri 16y ago
And breaking a window stimulates the economy because it means the window-fitter gets more business.
- Groxx 16y ago
  I don't see how it's possible to have a cost of less than $50-100/month for healthcare. And all forms of cost have to be accounted for - direct + taxes being by far the easiest to measure, but when people start claiming that it "costs nothing" they're ignoring the bigger picture of the economy as a whole. Especially when $60k/year is your bottom margin - that includes a lot of people => a lot of drain on the rest if it doesn't come from them. Nice reply, btw :)
  - jbri 16y ago
    The issue, I think, is that government spending is really in a different boat to private expenditure when it comes to the effect on the economy. Trying to model it as "you spend $X in taxes to pay for that healthcare" is a drastic oversimplification. If you instead look at all government spending as economic stimulus, and all taxation as a factor in inflation management, you get quite a different picture.
s3graham 16y ago
But by the "whole system" argument you're making, health care could easily have a negative cost. Let's hypothesize that all the engineers working in SV get an AIDS-like illness caused by spending too much time on news.yc. If there was a health care solution that would make sure that all the employees of Google, Intel, HP, etc. continued to function as usual by caring for those engineers, then even an extremely high up-front cost for that care would result in a net-win for the budget/economy/country. Of course, that's silly as it won't happen to that extreme. But, I don't think the downward-spiral of more-cuts-here-and-there that you describe is the only possible outcome. A positive virtuous-cycle of increased wealth production is also possible.
- wtallis 16y ago
  Before that positive outcome can have a chance of happening, we have to get rid of the obscenely expensive hopeless palliative end-of-life care (cue teabaggers screaming about "death panels"), and make basic healthcare universally available. The only ways that increased healthcare spending can increase productivity are through effective preventive measures and corrective treatments that return the patient to sufficient health to be productive, but that's not where our super-high healthcare costs come from. They come from the consequences of delayed care (eg. using only emergency rooms when you're uninsured, necessitating more risky treatments for more advanced problems, which means higher malpractice premiums) and from end-of-life care.