Fun fact: Americans pay more tax money towards healthcare than countries with universal tax-funded healthcare. How much healthcare does that spending get them? Zero. After overpaying tax for healthcare they also have to buy healthcare separately.
Yea cause we throw more money at it. Our facilities are far superior. In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
You seem to be saying two opposite things here, that the US is better because you spend more money on it, and yet also that you don't spend more money on it. Both can't be true, but both can be wrong.
> Our facilities are far superior.
Then why is US life expectancy worse?
> In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
Unless "very subsidized" means "by 100%", the UK's "folks with little money", or indeed significantly more than national average income, are still doing better. NHS care for citizens is zero upfront cost, except for dentistry and prescriptions which total to 1% of the UK's health costs.
The claim about taxes is just plain false, when considered over the whole USA and not cherrypicking the most favourable states within it: the US federal spending on Medicare + Medicaid is around $4,352/person, state-level spending added around $1,105/person on top of that for a total of around $5,457/person, and remember this is before personal insurance and co-pay costs which are on top of that: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2024_federal_budge...
So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
As a percentage of my paycheck what you cited as Medicare/Medicaid is again very low. State taxes are basically 2-3% and in some cases $0 and/or funded through real estate taxes rather than income tax. This is actually one of the arguments for American universal healthcare. We can bridge the final gap of uninsured with about 1-2% more in taxes. It would still be much less than what most countries pay by a substantial amount while still maintaining 90% of the level of care.
Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
Do not cite flat numbers as some sort of gotcha. Obviously we spend more money on our own healthcare. We have more of it with fewer hours of labor.
> If my salary is 150k and I spend 5k that's 3.3%.
> If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%.
So? The US federal taxes are not a constant dollar amount. Someone who earns $60k pays $5,020, someone who earns $150k pays $24,734, from the first tax calculator I found.
Same idea in the UK.
> So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
False.
The average person in the UK spends about half as many hours on health as the average person in the USA.
> The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
I know all of that. What's your argument here? Mine is that the NHS costs roughly the same as Americans spend on just this alone, and the UK doesn't then need other spending on top.
> Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
My argument is our basic NHS level care costs us less labor to reach and that the rest of that spend is a luxury on nicer facilities, equipment, rooms, food, nurses and other personal which we are happy to spend because it's a luxury we have that only the rich in the UK can afford while in the US at least the middle class can reach that level. We also classify these costs as healthcare when you might classify them in a different way as luxury add ons.
> My argument is our basic NHS level care costs us less labor to reach and that the rest of that spend is a luxury on nicer facilities, equipment, rooms, food, nurses and other personal which we are happy to spend because it's a luxury we have that only the rich in the UK can afford while in the US at least the middle class can reach that level. We also classify these costs as healthcare when you might classify them in a different way as luxury add ons.
Your argument is false.
Americans on average spend about as much per person as the average UK citizens spend on the NHS even though that care doesn't even reach all Americans because not all Americans are eligible for it.
You call an ambulance in the UK? Free*. You give birth in the UK? Free. When I was a kid and slipped into some ashes and burned an arm? Free care. When I was at university, hadn't gotten around to registering with a local doctor, had testicular torsion? Free surgery. Panic attack making me worried I was having a heart attack? Free both in the UK and again in Germany when I moved country. Accidentally peeled a finger on the inside of a tomato tin while making dinner (by this point in Germany)? Free treatment.
What do these things cost in practice in the US? I see the same viral bills as the rest of us, not lived experience, i.e. hundreds to tens of thousands for each of those things, and also reports claim the "average bill for a natural birth in the US comes in at $30,000": https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37555048
* to the user, obviously. "No bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective taxes" is functionally the same as "no bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective mandatory insurance". In fact, the UK calls it "National Insurance" though there's a whole argument about how correct the name is, while Germany it's literally a small list of mandatory-for-everyone-to-pick-one insurance corporations with so little room for manoeuvre between them they may as well be government owned.
> You don't seem to understand purchasing power what so ever.
I literally expressed it in terms of GDP.
I know I can be verbose at times, but US spends around 18.0% of GDP on health, UK 8.9%. Citations in previous comments.
> Anyway I was born in Europe so I know all this far better than you.
I also was born in Europe.
I still live in Europe, just a different country of Europe than where I started.
> Nothing about the NHS is free. They simply take it out of your paycheck.
As are the federal taxes covering Medicare and Medicaid and the state level stuff. Which. Sums. To. More. Than. The. UK. Spends. Per. Person.
(Aside: if you're going to insist it's "not free", back off about subsidised healthcare in the US: same applies).
Even when I then convert that to % of GDP, US government spending on healthcare is about the same as UK government spending on healthcare, but the US population then also spends more, as a percentage of GDP, on additional private healthcare, than the UK spends on just government healthcare, totalling just over twice as much as a percent of GDP.
The US spends around 18.0% of GDP on health, the UK 8.9%.
The UK population, spends less than half as much of its economic output, lives two years longer.
You should check out the stats broken down by ethnicity and household wealth. That gives you a clearer picture of what a typical person on HN actually experiences.
