When you remove all private insurance payments for health the US still spends more than other countries. The US government pays huge amounts for healthcare for lousy outcomes.
I live in a European country with a public health care system.
The lowest tax bracket is ~34% and the highest ~44%.
However due to a minimum below which no taxes are paid and other features, the effective rax rate for a $35k salary is ~15%. For a $90k salary it’s about 32%.
A median salary is about $70k.
This is excluding pension (the employer pays that on top to a pension fund).
Public services are pretty good and not expensive for me, they are even cheaper for people in lower income levels.
(Putting a kid in kindergarten is about $100-200/month for example)
If you take everything into account, I suspect it’s the US system is a much worse deal for everyone except the top 5-10%.
Different systems have different problems. In Canada, some people die due to wait times for treatable conditions, or are forced to wait so long that their condition worsens to be beyond repair and they are permanently debilitated. Over 50k people leave Canada per year to get their healthcare in the United States instead.
The trope that wait times are materially worse in single-payer systems is precisely that: a trope. You do not have to dig hard to find examples of wait-times measured in months to get diagnostic procedures scheduled, and where I live — the San Francisco Bay Area — the wait time for an initial consultation with, e.g., a dermatologist has been about the same, for as long as I've lived here. I know doctors who work in hospitals who've had to wait months for a breast cancer scan.
A thing that sucks in both systems can not legitimately be used to argue against only one of them.
That has to be weighed against both the wait times in the US and the amount of people who do not even try to go to the doctor to check out potential treatable conditions. Sure, the wait may (haven't verified) be longer, but I've never heard "can't afford to go to the doctor to check it out" / "don't call an ambulance, I don't have an insurance" from people outside of the US.
So sure, the amount of patients is pretty much guaranteed to be higher once they can afford the care. If you optimise only for wait times, then the obvious solution is to have no doctors and 0 wait time.
Ambulance rides are not socialized in Canada, and people skip going to the doctor for all sorts of reason. Stubborness is not an exclusively American trait.
Maybe if you have really great insurance in the US wait times aren't that bad, but the vast majority do not have great insurance, and wait times can still be many months to get in to see a specialist. Generally speaking critical care in Canada is not something you have to wait for. Cancer treatment and surgery, it's when you need it. Wait times for some things may be longer: Hip replacement big the issue isn't acute, for example.
Whether or no wait time varies greatly, the overall quality of care can be assessed in terms of patient outcomes life expectancy which are generally very similar while spending significantly less money. In fact many countries with socialized healthcare actually surpass the US on some factors like infant mortality, in part because the US has a higher poverty rate and those in poverty have less access to healthcare.
In Canada, conditions covered by the socialized plans are illegal to be treated by private practice. More than 50k people leave Canada every year to get treatment in the US to either avoid wait times or the government refuses to pay for the procedures.
> More than 50k people leave Canada every year to get treatment
Yes, like I said, anybody who can afford it can travel to get healthcare elsewhere.
Travelling from US to UK and paying 150% of the English tariff price for health care turns out to often be cheaper than getting care in the US, even if you include the travel costs.
The information is readily available - you could have taken 5 seconds and searched for it yourself instead of leaving a sarcastic unconstructive comment.
The site you link to mentions nothing about deaths nor about people going to the United States for treatment, including in the linked PDFs. Perhaps you could have tried to address the claims made instead of leaving a sarcastic unconstructive comment.
Don't forget that the US's rapid access to all the healthcare the patient wants leads to huge amounts of harm in the form of over-testing, over-diagnosis, and over-treatment.
Take 1000 men over 50 and give them PSA screening for prostate cancer for about 11 years.
Take 1000 different men over 50 and don't give them PSA screening for prostate cancer for about 11 years.
For the group without screening about 7 die from prostate cancer. But for the group who do have screening we see the same number of deaths. The screening hasn't prevented deaths from prostate cancer.
The group without screening didn't have any false alarms and didn't have any needless biopsies. 160 men in the group with screening had false alarms and unnecessary biopsies. 20 men in the screening group had treatment (which can include incontinence and impotence) for non-progressive prostate cancer.
It absolutely can be. The reason you don’t get colonoscopies until you’re in you’re 40s isn’t because they’re not fun. It’s because the risk of a false positive times the negative consequences thereof outweighs the benefit of you finding something early. People are wierd gooey lumps of random stuff. Scan anyone and you’ll find something out of place. The vast majority is irrelevant until some break even point where it’s not. Hence the recommendations and guidelines.
Just like you could have picked a credible source instead of a libertarian think tank. You are surely aware that the burden of proof for an assertion is on the proponent, not the disputant.
Ontario income tax rate: 12.16%
Canada federal tax rate: 26%
Employment Insurance and Social Security are deducted seperately and made up the rest of my deductions.
Connecticut state income tax rate: 5.50%
US federal tax: 22%
Unless social security rates are worse than Canada, I don't see how your situation is possible.
He’s incorrect because he has misquoted the evidence. Canada’s wait time data is restricted to medically necessary but non-emergent procedures. It is inaccurate to say that millions of people are dying while waiting for treatment. The average wait time for a cancer patient to be seen is 3 weeks. Average. Remember, not everyone with cancer is dying.
I appreciate the value of debate, but i ask that you please do your homework before you start citing the evidence
The US government already spends at least 10k per capita on healthcare - without even having a socialized medecine. More than double that of Canada at 4.8k per capita.
The United States is not a free market healthcare system - it's literally the worst parts of both capitalist and socialized systems with none of the benefits of either.
Also: I am Canadian, I spent nearly 50% of my earned income last year on just taxes. I also live in the most expensive city in the country. 90% of my medical expenses I've had in the past 10 years came from private practices that I paid out of pocket with a smidgen of private insurance that cushioned the blow a bit. The Canadian system is nowhere near as great as ignorant Americans like to believe.
I grew up in Canada, have family there I visit regularly and live in America. The tax rate in California top marginal is higher than Ontario and yet one includes healthcare. You don’t think you can spent 50% of your marginal income on taxes in California? I think with the state taxes no longer deductible it’s closer to 55%. I’ve only ever had great interactions with OHIP.
I prefer not to have beaureaucrats decide how I spend my money.
I've had a relative with a treatable condition wait so long for a surgery that her condition worsened and it couldn't be fixed and now she is permanently physically disabled.
They do the best they can with the budget they're given.
Private hospitals and health insurance are still allowed. Here in Canada, every public hospital still has a billing department for the uninsured & those with private insurance (foreigners, etc.) (I wonder if you can opt to pay to "skip the queue" here?)
What you're talking (skipping the queue) about is a two-tiered system, which I would be in-favor of but it is taboo to even bring it up in Canada (or at least, that has been my experience).
This argument is long, long past its expiration date.
While the US by some measurements has a lower overall tax rate than other developed countries [1], the difference between us and, say, Canada, who enjoy high quality socialized health care, is far from "exorbitant".
There's a very reasonable argument for considering all of the consequences of our systematically broken health care system as a "tax" -- it amounts to a massive financial and quality-of-life burden for most Americans.
Health care in the United States is more expensive than in other developed countries for identical procedures [2]. Medical costs are the worst kind of lottery, where an overnight visit for tonsillitis can get you a nice little $100,000 bill [8]. Do you not consider that a tax? Why not?
Medical bills account for 60% of bankruptcies in the US [3]. High medical costs are literally causing people to commit suicide [4] or to die of entirely preventable causes [5] while others just forego care entirely [9]. For those people who do jump through the hoops to get private medical insurance, there are entire bureaucracies dedicated to denying claims [6]. There are so many perverse incentives involved that some doctors are taking it into their own hands to try to lower medication costs, and pharmaceutical companies are responding by tripling the costs of the medication [7].
Meanwhile tons and tons of Americans stay in jobs they don't like just to maintain their employer-sponsored health insurance [10], strangling their wages and preventing positions from being opened up to more enthusiastic employees.
These things are all taxes. They are taxes on American society, impacting all of us. Anybody that's opposed to socialized health care "because muh taxes" is defending this system, this embarrassing, broken, corrupt system that endangers and kills countless people every year and acts as a massive multi-faceted anchor on our economy.
