As someone considering a sabbatical, let's clarify one thing. Yes, health benefits are tied to the employer and getting health insurance privately (or through C

As someone considering a sabbatical, let's clarify one thing. Yes, health benefits are tied to the employer and getting health insurance privately (or through CORBA) is expensive, but wages are higher in the US. You can buy health insurance, and if you time things right you can get "Obamacare" which won't make your premiums too high. It's possible to save money on a tech salary in the US for staying a few months, or even a year, on a sabbatical. Maybe it will cost you 100K or so for a year in an average city in the US, assuming a family of 3 and no other income, a third of that being health costs. But it's possible to save 100K to do that. Hey, we're asking for the entirety of society to work to provide us a ton of services/products (even beyond healthcare) while we're resting, so that shouldn't be so surprising, right? One thing that I read a lot on HN are arguments talking about how having to pay for health insurance makes things impossible, as if people didn't have other expenses. For most people, rent is more expensive than health insurance, so are we going to say we can't go on sabbaticals because we don't have public housing? I understand that it's not easy to deal with private health insurance, but millions of self employed people in the US do exactly that, some of them with top notch (and expensive) health insurance. In a country with public healthcare, you don't need to save the healthcare part. But you still need to save for all other expenses - rent, childcare, bills, transportation, books etc. So maybe it would cost half as much to go on a Sabbatical in other places, but in general tech wages in "other places" aren't nearly as high as in the US. So in the end it is kind of the same.