Most likely, but I have the option of not buying that product - I don’t have the option of not paying taxes.
I doubt that to be true. Seems to me if people weren’t job hopping, things would be more efficient.
Apparently, if you don’t have everyone forced to participate, it doesn’t work - that is what I was told in the Pit thread on this subject. However, I don’t care if they want to try something like that, as long as I don’t have to pay for it.
It does when work permits and such are involved.
It is not at all ties to NHS - just private health insurance the same as I would get in the US, except this company did not black list me for my pre-existing condition the way all the American companies did. Alas, US law prevents them from offering coverage in the US.
What do you pay out now? There is 7.65% for FICA and I am guessing about 25% for income and state taxes, so that is almost 33%… not much different.
But if all employers are paying it affects every product from tomatoes to jet aircraft.
You must not have a very good understanding of the US tax structure. We are among the top 5% households in the USA in terms of Adjusted Gross Income, and I just did my taxes, so I have a lot of the numbers handy:
We paid 20.9% of our Gross Income in Federal Income Taxes and 4.5% in State Income Taxes.
Another 5.4% in Social Security and 1.3% in Medicare. Finally 1.2% in Sales Taxes and 1.9% in Property Taxes (house and car).
That is a total of 35.2%. We are unfortunately structured most unfavorable from a tax standpoint, two almost equal earners. If we were instead a doctor and a stay at home wife, instead of two financial professionals, on the same income we would pay about 2% less. About the only way we would could pay more taxes would be to drink more and take up smoking! And we live in one of the highest tax states of the country.
I think this would compare with an AVERAGE person’s tax burden in the EU.
The average European pays about 10% more of their income in Taxes (at least before the EU expanded eastward) than an American in the same income stratum. But nothing like all of that difference goes to healthcare, only a tiny fraction does.
Europeans get more services, and in general a more competent and better respected government. We get a much, much bigger and better equipped military. Over the last 65 years Western Europe has benefitted rather handsomely from this military capability, whether they like to admit it or not.
Maybe proponents of UHC should tap into the “fuck other countries!” vibe a portion of their opponents feel. Tell them about how Europe has been free riding off our drug development and military protection for years - then we can convert to UHC and cut drug company profits and downsize the military to SHOW THOSE DAMN FURRINERS. 
So I guessed well. And since Czech tax is a flat 15%, the taxes you pay are similar (although lower income earners would pay a bit less in the US). For that EU citizens get great public transport (a monthly pass in Prague for unlimited travel is about $30).
A little goes to Health Care, and yours goes to the military. Europe did benefit from the US military (though the Czech Republic lost out!), but all in all I think EUers get more bang for their Euro-buck.
If I remember correctly, Korea has some kind of partially-socialized national health care plan also. My taxes while I worked there was a standard 3.3% income tax with an additional 1.5% for the health plan.
Granted, Korean health care was more expensive than I’ve experienced in more fully socialized countries, but it was still many times less expensive than getting sick in America. I wonder how they do that if taxes on normal people have to be so high to support a national health plan? High corporate taxes?
No your guess was waaaay off. Our tax rate is more than double the average for Americans. You are comparing the 95th percentile in the US with the 50th percentile in Europe and saying, see, they are almost the same.
You would have to get a work permit to work for a company offering group insurance in the US?
Well, as I said I cannot comment on why this works because I don’t know the terms of the policy.
I don’t consider FICA when I am looking at my tax bite since (theoretically) I will get that back when I am 65 - it’s more like the 401K deductions. The percentage of income tax paid to the state and the fed depends on one’s income, and then how much you end up paying depends on what deductions you have. Last year we paid about 18%.
Well obviously there is no solution. Band-aids in American hospitals are just meant to cost $15 each, vs 11 cents anywhere else. I am sure you are happy with your employer-provided insurance and I am glad it works for you.
Someday, maybe I’ll get to see my home again because I can’t seem to get a job that offers any health insurance in my country. Where are all these health-insurance providing jobs? Of all my friends, only 2 have health insurance, and they work in financial services. Others work for retailers, as baggage handlers, software developers, restaurants, real estate agents and more - none of these have insurance.
I think the system in America is terrible.
Why would all employers pay it? They don’t now - generally those companies that can afford to pay a decent salary will also offer insurance; those who pay at or just above minimum wage don’t. Which makes sense, since folks are not supposed to be living on minimum wage.
Hmm… I have friends working in Nevada for employers and earning $50K+ that get no insurance. Be happy you have good coverage… millions of us don’t. I can’t even provide insurance for my own employees because of my health condition. A group plan for my company would cost upwards of $3000 per month per employee since my “uninsurable” condition while not preventing coverage under a group plan, still makes it completely unaffordable.
This had led me to hire people outside the US.
Bandaids don’t cost $15 in hospitals - I’m not even sure if there are any that even use them, not in an in-patient setting anyway. Its irrelevant anyway since the US government is not known for paying a realistic cost for supplies, so it’s not like a government sponsored health care plan will suddenly lower costs.
That is why there is private insurance available. If you cannot get private insurance due to a pre-existing condition that noone will touch, then you either stay where you are or you get an education that will give you a job that will provide group insurance. I have no idea why your friends don’t have coverage, tho looking over those jobs some appear to be low paying/part time and other appear to be contract jobs. Not the sorts of careers that would be expected to provide group health insurance.
Whether or not it is, the answer is not to force me to pay to cover yet another portion of other peoples’ lives.
The last job I had, which ended Sept 2007, I made about $32K and had group coverage.
I currently have coverage because my husband went to college and got a career that provides group health insurance. If it didn’t, he makes enough and our expenses are low enough that we could buy a private policy. You know, planning ahead and being responsible for ourselves.
And what would you have done if your husband (or you) had been debilitatingly injured in a car accident or was diagnosed with a chronic, debilitating disease while he was in college?
Okay, before considering those costs, let’s first think about the kinds of forces the market brings, and what will happen if we eliminate them:
** - Prices.** Prices are everything. Prices set supply. Prices stimulate demand. Prices act as a control on excess demand. IF health care was an efficient market, the price of services would rise to the market clearing price that represents the true value people put on their health care. This would allow us to figure out where to allocate resources. It would ensure that we have enough doctors and nurses, and no more or no less. Prices wouldn’t ensure social outcomes (some people still wouldn’t be able to afford care), but in an efficient market, prices would help ensure that the right resources were going to the right places.
** - Competition**. Again, IF health care was an efficient market, price gouging and excess fees would stimulate competition, which would act as a check on high prices.
** - Efficiency**. If health care was an efficient market, there would be tremendous pressure to keep ancillary costs like record-keeping and other administrative overheads in check. A poorly-run hospital with high administration costs would lose customers as people discovered that another hospital offered the same service or better at a lower price.
Given all that, it’s clear that health care is NOT an efficient market. There are market failures aplenty.
The key issue, then, is whether our efforts in reforming health care should be directed at correcting those market failures so that the private system can become more efficient, or whether we should just replace the private system with a government-run system, or at least give government central control over the now quasi-private system.
I firmly believe that the best course of action, if possible, is to correct the market failures so that health care pricing becomes efficient, then to address social concerns with direct subsidies to patients without losing the key requirement of maintaining market-based prices and requiring that people pay at least some of the cost so that prices truly reflect demand.
So what can we do to correct for market failures in health care? To figure that out, we have to identify those failures:
**Information Asymmetry **- This is the big one, and it drives most of the distortions in health care - administrative costs, HMOs, the need for employer-based health insurance. Simply put, there’s a lemon market in health care. Health insurers don’t know as much about your health as you do. So they charge a risk premium. This drives the healthiest and youngest people out of the market, which raises the risk, which raises the premium again. Eventually, you wind up with only the sickest being insured, but for exhorbitant rates.
No one like this. Insurers would be happier with a competitive market. So they seek to cover people through statistical sampling to lower the risk. Employer-based health care works for that purpose, since a large enough pool of employees in most industries represents a fairly good cross section of the public, health-wise.
The high cost of insurance then drives other costs up. Malpractice insurance goes up. Paperwork goes up. Expensive defensive medicine is practiced.
Inelastic Supply - Another problem in health care is that the supply is somewhat inelastic. New hospitals just can’t spring up when needed, because it’s difficult to create more doctors and nurses on short notice. This gives many regional medical centers monopoly power. Also, groups like the American Medical Association and nursing unions distort the supply side.
Government Interference Medicare and Medicaid and the VA are already essentially state run medical systems, and they consume an increasingly large percentage of resources and have a huge effect on the market.
If we can fix these problems without destroying the essence of market-based health care, we’d have the best of all worlds. So how can we do that?
Government can intervene to fix the insurance market. For example, the government could act as an intermediary to private health insurers to correct for information asymmetry. It could do this by offering health insurance to the public (or mandating it), then auctioning off pools of randomly chosen insurees. The insurance companies get to price their risk efficiently, insurance gets priced at its real value, and everyone wins. The difficulty here is that with government in the middle, politics would continually intrude.
Government could lower some requirements for health care workers, and open up new categories of workers. For example, in many places trained nurses do most of the duties on the unit, even stuff that really doesn’t take a lot of training to do. So some health providers hire lesser trained people like licensed practical nurses or nursing aids. This helps keep costs down. Government could pressure the AMA to make sure it isn’t needlessly restricting entry to medical school in order to maintain high doctor wages.
Cass Sunstein, a member of the Obama administration, has a cheap idea for improving private adoption of health insurance. It’s called ‘nudging’. For example, studies show that people who have savings deducted from their paychecks tend to save more money than those who are responsible for putting their own cash aside for savings after they’ve received it. So if you want more saving, just pass a law requiring employers to make savings programs the default, and employees have to opt out if they don’t want it. More people would just go along with the default state, and overall savings will rise.
I like this idea, because it’s not very coercive. I’m not forced to save - I’m just forced to fill out a form if I don’t want to. The government is making some substantive behavioral changes with a very light touch on liberty. So set up citizen health accounts that automatically start when someone starts employment. Make them opt out of it, but but some mild penalty on it to push the default choice slightly. For example, you could say that health purchases made from the savings account get you a 10% tax credit. If you take the money out, and then buy health coverage outside the account, you don’t get the credit. That would force people to realistically think about the likelihood of health expenses in the year and at least attempt to save something for it.
On the social side, I’d like to see universal insurance - but only catastrophic insurance, with the deductible indexed to a person’s wage. In other words, if you make $20,000 per year, you might be required to pay the first $500 of annual medical costs. The state would pick up the difference. If you make $100,000, you can pay the first $5,000. If you are a gazillionaire, you can pay for your own damned health care.
The deductible should be high enough that it’s still a bit painful to spend, so that people have an incentive to realistically price the value of minor treatments they might otherwise seek out. But the price shouldn’t be so high as to bankrupt anyone if a serious medical issue arises.
If the government then pooled all the people and divvied them up among insurance companies, rather than just becoming its own insurer, it would have an incentive to maintain efficiency and not bloat out, because if costs run higher than the auction price, no one will buy the risk and the government will have to suck it all up.
Government provided catastrophic health insurance could be supplemented by gap insurance for those who are really risk averse. Gap insurance would be very cheap, because the upside risk is capped. I imagine a lot of employers would offer gap insurance. It would cost them a lot less than the current system.
A system like this gives everyone health coverage, ensures that no one has their life destroyed by sudden illness or accident, and yet retains the essentially free market nature of U.S. health care. Makes the market better, even.
There’s your alternative plan.
In a strictly philosophcial sense, considering that one way or another people without medical care with urgent problems will receive medical care they can’t pay for, which you’re already paying for through taxes and higher insurance costs - if universal coverage actually lowered the amount that you’re forced to pay for people who’d otherwise be uninsured, would you still oppose it?
I’m wondering if your motivation is more “I got mine, screw everyone else” or “I planned ahead, and I’m okay. Clearly people who aren’t okay didn’t plan ahead. Screw them for not being as smart as me”.
Which isn’t to say that anyone who doesn’t want UHC has one of those attitudes - but the fact that you immediately look to any situation raised in this thread and see how you can blame it on people less prepared/dumber/whatever than you seems to indicate you lean one of those ways.
You seem unwilling to acknowledge that there might be practical flaws in the current system, such as locking people into jobs indefinitely, or jobs which deliberately cut people’s hours in order to avoid paying them benefits, or insurance companies finding some fine print under which to reject someone’s coverage.
To make this an accurate comparison, you’d have to include the costs Americans pay for things like insurance, and what their employers pay, that exceed what Europeans pay. You mentioned it in passing, but judging from what my daughter reports, lots of things are significantly subsidized there, things which are hidden taxes in the US in a sense.
Well, I don’t know for a fact since I didn’t know him back then, but since his parents were responsible and concerned, I imagine they would have taken care of him until he could take care of himself.
I do have a chronic, debilitating disease and worked thru it until last September. If I had been unable to continue working prior to meeting and marrying my husband, I guess I would have starved to death, dunno. I certainly wouldn’t have gone about demanding that other people pay for me to go to the doctor any more than I demanded they buy me food back in the day when I couldn’t afford it.
How often do you suppose it happens that a young person going to college is in a serious car accident or suddenly comes up with a serious illness and they don’t have any support system at all?
I have an education. I provide jobs for 4 people. Last year I earned roughly $250K. No, I do not provide health care for these people as I would also have to provide it for myself which as I said costs $3K/mo each due to my condition. Perhaps where you live, most employers provide insurance. In my state, they do not.
Why do I have to pay for the police and fire departments to protect you? Why do I have to pay for the military to protect you? None of these protect me.
I make way more than enough to afford a normal individual plan, but nobody will sell one to me… thus the reason I left the USA seven years ago. I still have a bunch of stuff in storage on the chance that I’ll be able to move back one day.
You’re narrowing the argument too much. Illness and injury strike at any phase of a person or family’s life. College is one instance (and you’ll admit that there are probably more than a handful of people who wouldn’t have adequate support, even as young as they are), but there are many times in any person’s life when such a malady would be of particularly bad timing. For example, immediately after being fired, immediately after moving markets, immediately after another family member got sick, after grad school, after having a baby, during an economic downturn, etc. The examples are as limitless as the varied lives of Americans.
For the purposes of this thread and only one factor of the whole shebang, there are arguably enough people who fall into the above category to make the system significantly less efficient and more costly to America as a whole. Especially when talking about catastrophic illness and injury.
Simply arguing that anecdotally you know of plenty of people who have jobs and have managed to provide themselves a basic level of care does not address the problem at hand, nor does it acknowledge the fact that the above cases exist and are a strain on the economy; and, on further thought, nor does it attempt to justify the exorbitant cost of health care in America.