While we have compulsory health insurance not dissimilar to the German system, most areas only have one or two providers (vs. 130 of Germany) whose prices have been going up like 30% every year. We still pay out of pocket for most medicine, dentistry, emergency (like ambulances), and psychological services.
Some utilities are ridiculously expensive. Like internet can be 80$ a month for basic 2 mbps.
A large number of people are employed as contractors these days (the gig economy), which adds a 15% tax (that the employer would pay for employees) for a social security service we will likely never see, so I'm not sure the tax burden is higher. Contractors also have to pay for all their own health insurance (and our cutoff for public assistance for health insurance is like 12k, not the 50k Euro like in Germany)
Which brings me to: we have to pay for our own retirement, even if not contractors most companies don't assist with that anymore, especially for entry level jobs.