There’s a meme going around that goes something like this: Americans will gladly pay 20% of their salary for ‘employer-provided’ health coverage, but complain that 5% of their salary for universal health care is ‘socialism’. A reply to the tweet in the meme is from a Scot, who says he pays 4% of his salary, and he’s paid more for a pizza.
Non-U.S. Dopers: What percentage of your salary does your universal health care cost?
Most Australian taxpayers pay 2%, there is an additional levy if your income is high and you don’t take out private health insurance to ease the burden on the public system.
https://www.privatehealth.gov.au/healthinsurance/incentivessurcharges/mls.htm
I pay nothing as a person on a (government) disability pension and I receive free care and even cheaper prescriptions than the usual subsidised rate. I even get a pension supplement to help me pay and there is a cap on my yearly spend before my medications are free. There is a cap for everyone, just higher for those not on benefits. Not all drugs are covered but most are.
I’d rather be working but as I can’t I am very grateful for our system.
As I have to file both a US and an Australian return, I can tell you with certainty that I paid 10.6% more income tax in Australia than I would have were I still residing in the States, in 2017.
Income tax is the only withholding from my paycheck - I don’t have to contribute to a health plan through my employer, for example, nor is there any Medicare or Social Security withholding, nor their equivalent. Since I don’t recall what I was paying for my (shitty) plan at my last job in the States, I can’t state that I’m better off financially with certainty, but I’m pretty sure I’ve come out ahead here.
The additional tax Thylacine refers to is called the Medicare Levy surcharge, and kicks in at incomes above 100,000 AUD, as I recall.
By the way, no deductible, nor copays either, nor do I have to hunt for a doctor in my plan.
Here’s a simplified tax calculator for Australia. Remember that Australia doesn’t have filing statuses as the US does; all are individual.
Also remember to convert to and from Australian dollars; as of 31 December 2018, the exchange rate was 1AUD=.7058 USD.
So, if you want to compare apples to apples, as much as is possible, work out what your Australian income tax would be, and then compare it to your US, adding in SS, Medicare, and any health plan payments.
I pay income taxes. That pays my health care. It’s not allocated on my tax bill, any more than police, or fire, or highways, or any other public services get itemised.
As for the tax rate, I posted a link to an article a year or two ago that compared US to Canadian tax rates and overall didn’t find much difference.
This, exactly; but I will put a finer point on it: only part of my income and other taxes (e.g. sales, excise, customs duties, etc.) pays for my health care. The rest of the taxes that I pay go to various other government services: highways, national defense, overseas consular and diplomatic services, education, the cost of government itself, various boards and tribunals, and so on and so on. Everything is paid into federal and provincial general revenues, and everything–all of the above, and more, plus health care–is paid from general revenues.
At any rate, Northern Piper is quite correct when he states that the dollars we owe for health care are not allocated on tax bills or returns; and I’ll add that they are not itemized on pay stubs or T-4s (same as W-2s). Given all of the above, Johnny, I’m unsure how many of my own tax dollars went to my province’s health care system last year (or for that matter, how much went to highways, national defense, etc.). Some went to health care, certainly, but I don’t have enough information to be able to give you a percentage.
Anyway, at the end of the day, I can still afford pizza. 
I’m self-employed, so I pay both “the employee’s half” and “the employer’s half”. I’m also already counting down to retirement so, like many self-employed people in Spain, I’m already paying the maximum (retirement benefits are calculated based on the contribution from your last X years; X has been shifting up).
That’s 283.32€/month. Two hundred and eighty-three euros, thirty-two cents. And it covers both UHC and the country-wide retirement benefits; it also gives me access to job-training programs, which in my case and right now aren’t terribly relevant but which come in handy for many other people, and if I was third-party-employed it would cover unemployment benefits.
Germany: I pay 7.65% of my gross salary for statutory health insurance (percentages vary a bit between carriers - mostly only in the third significant digit), and my employer is required to pay the same. I can deduce 96% of that premium from my taxable income, and for my employer it‘s an expense of course, so for both of us the net expense is in the order of 60% of the gross expense.
These 7.65% are not a fixed premium but a percentage of wage, so I am cross-subsidising lower earners which is OK with me.
And, even in countries where a specific tax is earmarked or labelled as a tax to finance healthcare, the link with healthcare financing is often fairly notional; healthcare may be partially finances of of a social security-type tax indicated as a health contributinon, and partly financed out of general revenues.
Big-picture comparisons of the cost of universal healthcare can be made by looking at public healthcare expenditure as a percentage of GDP or in absolute terms; this page has some figures. (Obviously not all of the countries in that list provide universal healthcare through government expenditure, but if you know the countries you’re interested in you can find the data for them.)
But as to how this cost falls on individuals, that depends on the spread of the tax burden in the country concerned. That’s an entirely separate policy question which generally has little or nothing to do with healthcare policy.
Others have covered it nicely but it is worth stressing that for many people the standard of care they get when paying x% in taxes is exactly the same as they get when paying 0% in taxes. Also, working parent’s contribution to health care doesn’t change just because they have a non-working partner and kids to cover as they are automatically covered out of the collective pot.
Working parents’ or working (grand)children. My maternal grandmother never paid a penny in taxes she could avoid (definitely nothing on her own income), but she got the same standard of care as if she’d contributed every single day from her first envelope with money back in the early 1930s, to reaching retirement age in the late 1970s. Her pension was the lowest type, called “non-contributing”, but ex-fucking-cuse me, that egg’s nest she was so proud of was partly funded precisely by her not contributing to Seguridad Social!
I pay between 2 and 3 percent of my gross pay. That covers everything, including dental. I could pay less if I increased my deductible; now it is the standard 385 per year (but many things are free regardless, like GP visits).
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UK: the NHS is funded from the general pot of government income, and takes up roughly 18-20% of government expenditure. I haven’t updated my back-of-an-envelope calculations recently, but a couple of years ago I worked out that 18% of income tax and National Insurance contributions for people in employment worked out at somewhere around 4-5% of gross income, more or less up the salary scale from the median household income to at least £150,000 p.a.
People below certain income levels don’t pay either of those, of course, and people in retirement like me don’t pay NI. My recent tax summary statement from the Revenue tells me I paid £903 in income tax for the government’s health budget, which is less than 3% of my gross income, which is just above the median household income. Because I’m retired, I also get my prescriptions completely free of charge, where most people pay something like £8 per NHS prescription.
On top of that there would be slightly less than 4% of whatever VAT one pays on relevant goods, and 18% of whatever additional duties are paid on e.g., fuel, alcohol, tobacco, insurance premiums, betting, flight departures (basically. not particularly noticeable).
There is always debate about adjusting rates, and so on, maybe that better-off pensioners like me should go on paying National Insurance contributions, or the same prescription charges as working adults. Sometimes people propose a ring-fenced or “hypothecated” tax charge for the NHS, but our treasury traditionally hates ring-fencing income streams, so it would take a major political effort to bring in something like that.
I’ve never had private medical insurance (probably couldn’t get it now, except at prohibitive rates), but I’ve never felt the need to, and am happy to stick to NHS provision. Living in London, I probably have access to a wider range of provision than people in some other parts of the country, and fortunately have never had particularly difficult or complicated issues to be dealt with: but I don’t feel it’s difficult to get a routine appointment with the local GP practice, and the few occasions when they wanted to refer me on to specialist advice, it didn’t seem like too long a wait, maybe ten days to a fortnight.
In Norway, healthcare is funded from our general taxes, which are not itemized. Most adults also pay co-pays when utilizing health care or filling perscriptions, this is capped at about 300 $ total per year. After that it is free at the point of delivery.
Wikipedia actually has a good chart. The blue bars are healthcare costs per person paid for by public money, i.e. taxes. Per person. The pink bars are how much the citizens pay in private costs after that weather for insurance or out of pocket.
Note that this is per capita, not per taxpayer. Nations with a lot of two-income couples and high employment will have lower actual costs.
Currently very little. Last year, and I expect this year, I was well below the income tax threshold, as I’m only working part time as a student, so all I’m paying is any fraction of other taxes (VAT maybe) that wind up funding the NHS.
I do pay for my prescriptions, but as I need a few at the moment, I’m buying ‘prepayment cards’ as it works out cheaper; £29.10 for 3 months.
The other exception, and the awkward one for me, is dentistry. There’s a serious local NHS dentist shortage, so my dentist is near where I used to live. I have to arrange visits for when I’m up that was anyway, which is inconvenient, but doesn’t work out too badly for me as I visit several times a year and my dentist is flexible on appointments, but it is a serious issue for others in the area. I have to pay for the dentist, but it’s generally far cheaper than going private, at least if I’m going that way anyway.
Anyway, in general, the total amount of tax money the USA spends on Medicare, Medicaid, VA and IHA is equal to or little bit more per person than the most expensive UHC systems in the rest of the world.
As for percentage of salary, its a little bit like asking an American what percentage of his specific salary goes to the US military. Your tax bill doesn’t contain that information.
In Italy it is also part if my taxes, but I don’t know how much of it goes to health and how much to bureaucracy, bunga bunga parties and er…roads and schools, I guess.
The healthcare system is quite creaky with long waiting lists which you can decide to cut by coughing up the cash to go private. Having said that, once you do get to see the doctor, care is usually good. On top of that, we pay a contribution for specialist services (everything apart from GP visits) so in actual fact it isn’t really free, even if the contribution is a fraction of what the a private provider would charge.
Still, with all its flaws, I’m happy we have this system because I know nobody will be ruined just by getting sick and nobody needs to avoid necessary healthcare because of their finances.
In Ontario, I don’t pay anything individually as it comes out fo general revenues. As an employer, I pay a 1.495% Employer Health Tax no my payroll in excess of $500,000/year. We also pay for supplemental insurance for our staff which includes drugs, out of province insurance, life insurance, and a health care spending account which can be used for dental, glasses, massage, etc.
I did a quick search and it looks like UK-wide healthcare spending was 147.5 billion pounds. The 2017 budget was 802 billion pounds, which means 18.4% on healthcare. The figure I recall on total tax burden for an upper-middle-class earner is 42%, which seems about right. So 7.73% of total income. For me, that doesn’t include dentistry and opticians. So for me, it’s a bit expensive. On the other hand, I’m paying not to be surrounded by sick poor people, so that’s a plus.
2019 figures: UK Public Spending Breakdown: Central Government and Local Authorities 1692-2025 - Charts
Basically the same.
According to the Guardian: “Our survey found that someone earning £100,000 in the UK in effect loses about 34.3% of their pay to HM Revenue & Customs once personal allowances, income tax and national insurance are taken into account.” That would be nearly four times the average income.
Oh yeah. Universal Health Care will **never **work. No way. It will bankrupt individuals and the gummint, too. If the Ur-peens **think **it’s working, well, they’re mistaken. Anyhoo, they’re Socialists [ewww!], so you can’t believe anything they say, amirite? :dubious:
<ThelmaLou goes off to beat her head against a brick wall. And weep.>
