But you’ve screwed up the real figures by focusing on “income tax”. Income tax is only paid on money that is classified as income. And guess what the money earned by wealthy people is classified as? Often times it’s capital gains - that’s when you make your money through investments rather than a salary. Warren Buffet is one of the richest men in the country - but his salary is just $100,000 a year.
What’s the tax rate on capital gains? It maxes out at 20% - just above half of the max income tax rate of 39.6%. And up to 2012, the max rate was only 15%.
So the reality of tax rates is that wealthy people generally pay a far lower tax rate than middle class people do.
But do go on about how unfair the system is to rich people.
This is not true. The average tax rate for the top 1% is 27%, the average rate for the top 10% is 20.75%. The average rate for those in the top 25-50% is 7.31% and the average rate for the bottom 50% is 3.3%.
When you include all taxes the picture does not change.
Very few wealthy people make most of their money in capital gains and for most people capital gains only makes up a large portion of their income when they sell a house.
Buffet pays himself a relatively small salary so he pays a relatively low rate. Most of his wealth is in unrealized capital gains and you only pay money on capital gains when they are realized. However, his companies pay a 25% tax rate and he owns 33% of his companies. As a shareholder he is actually paying hundred of millions of dollars in tax. So if you took the money he actually pays in taxes it is ten or more times his nominal income of 100,000.
Yes but if health care doesn’t reduce morbidity or mortality, what is the point? The care I’m talking about is care that is not clinically any better than doing nothing (and many times worse than doing nothing). Or the excess we spend on administration.
30-50% of health spending doesn’t make people healthier, it just adds expense and risk. Health care is the third leading cause of death and causes millions of injuries. So care no better than placebo doesn’t serve any function.
Your initial statement could have encompassed treatments and care that slow the progression of disease or improve quality of life without changing the course of a disease. That’s my only issue with your wording.
There is a startling statistical fallacy here. How many deaths does health care prevent (or, obviously, postpone)? How many of the people killed by failed health care would have died anyway? i.e., if I give you a heart transplant, and it fails, it’s preposterous to say, “Health care was the cause of your death.” A heart transplant was the only possible hope you had left.
What about the disasterous hospital-borne infections? I have heard horror stories of people going to the hospital for easily treatable issues, and then dying of MRSA or C. Dificile. If you have a sprained ankle, go to the hospital for treatment, and die from a MRSA infection, I would say that you did die from healthcare.
Nope. Medical errors, hospital acquired infections, side effects from medications, side effects from surgeries done properly, etc. is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
Seeing how a (potentially huge) chunk of health care is no better than placebo, and that many treatments have NNTs in the triple digits, it is a serious issue to consider.
Infrastructure is expensive because you need to double the current heath care infrastructure. Since these are now government employees they have all the benefits that go along with that. That is expensive. You saw from the rollout of healthcare.gov how good the government at creating new computer systems. Medicare fraud is already a huge problem, if you want to have any shot at stopping people from ripping of tens of billions from the system you need ways to monitor who is getting the benefits and to make sure they are actually being treated.
If you kept the current system in place and just used one company, then you would have either many people uncovered or many poor people stuck with expensive health insurance. If are going to subsidize the cost of poor people’s insurance then you need to raise taxes to get that. So either you have to raise taxes anyway or you have just screwed a bunch of poor people.
I disagree. Right now there is no linkage between true costs of equipment and time with health care costs. Add to that that we know that insurance companies get discounts off of the billed costs and ISTM there is a lot of room to cut spending while providing the same care.
As a Canadian I think Americans should keep there current system as it seems to work for them. They like it. Most people down in the states don’t actually “lose their house” because of paying off medical bills from a serious illness. That’s a myth.
Generally speaking, we like to back up statements here with citations (or “cites”). While you’re technically correct, statistics show that almost 2/3 of personal bankruptcies in the US result from medical expenses. Now, filing bankruptcy may well be what prevents you from losing your house, but bankruptcy is also usually a fairly drastic measure, and damages a family’s finances for years to come.
I am sorry for not putting in the citations. From who I have talked to (in the real world) medical coverage nightmares are relatively rare for most insured Americans.
What do you guys think about our Canadian healthcare? do you have any positive opinions.
Rare in the absolute, perhaps, but if the article’s numbers are right, roughly 900,000 people in the US file individual bankruptcy due to medical expenses annually.
The article also points out that most people who file for bankruptcy due to medical bills do have some sort of health insurance.
Also, despite 3 years of Obamacare, there are still roughly 32 million in the US with no health insurance.
I don’t know a lot about it, but admire all I’ve heard.
I have a friend who is an Australian doctor, and he keeps sending me wonderful books on the Australian health-care system. Makes me wish we had something that good!
(Australia’s system is informally two-tiered. Basic coverage is free, but anyone who has any money buys a private supplemental policy, for extras like a private room instead of a bed in a ward, etc. Taxes on the private policies help fund the basic, universal coverage. Great for everybody.)
The ones on the newborn and mammograms wouldn’t be considered under any of the UHC systems I’ve been a part of. Take into account that any procedure is recommended or not for a series of reasons, not just one, and for example mammograms were recommended for me based on family history way before they would have been based on age. The others would.
No, what I mean is that they are very much covered.
The other items may or may not be covered. Which medications are covered for which situations is under constant review, for example. But nobody, nobody, would declare “underweight” a reason to not do anything for a newborn - specially not a weigh which is barely a 7-monther! Micropreemies much smaller than that are saved almost routinely nowadays: a “routine” which still involves a lot of care and a lot of stress, but still, routine enough to not make news unless there was half a dozen of them.
And I am telling you that in Spain, France, Switzerland, Sweden or the UK it is considered very low but that doesn’t mean “worth doing nothing”. You apparently think those countries should and would have a 100% death rate.