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In Germany only 40+% of your income goes to taxes and social security. Plus another meager ~20% on most things you buy. Plus a small tax on many things that are
by elpocko 1y ago
In Germany only 40+% of your income goes to taxes and social security. Plus another meager ~20% on most things you buy. Plus a small tax on many things that are supposedly bad for you, like ~70% on cigarettes. Death is taxed at a discount, only 15-40% depending on how rich you were.
"Free" healthcare though. It's a bargain!
- WalterBright 1y ago"Free" healthcare always turns out to be the most expensive healthcare.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoI call BS on this statement. And German healthcare isn’t even free.
- WalterBright 1y agoOf course. And historically, US health care costs rose at about the rate of inflation until the late 1960s, where the curve tilted strongly upwards at a much higher rate, and continues today. What happened in the late 1960s? The advent of "free" healthcare!
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoWhich free health care caused US healthcare to get so expensive?
- WalterBright 1y agoFree healthcare was part of LBJ's "Great Society".
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoDid it happen?
- stouset 1y agoThis take is wildly out of sync with the reality that the U.S., as one of the few developed nations without free healthcare, pays more for their healthcare than all of them while having worse than average outcomes. The worst healthcare is in reality American healthcare. We pay through the nose for the privilege of getting terrible results.
- _zoltan_ 1y agoSwitzerland has almost the same system as the US, and it works - when my wife needed an MRI, she got referred at around 11am by a specialist, for a call around 1pm to see if she's available that afternoon. She wasn't so they agreed on the next day. Is it expensive? Yes. Does it work? Absolutely.
- WalterBright 1y agoI received a CAT scan a couple years ago, about 4 hours after I wandered into urgent care. Before they stuffed me through the toroid, I asked the operator to set the dials to 1988 so I could advise my former self to buy MSFT with everything I had. The bill was quite a whopper, though Obamacare paid most of it. Of course, my Obamacare premiums are about 4x what they were before Obamacare.