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Comment by yitosda | Hacker News Reader

You're putting words in my mouth, complete with quotation marks. I never said anything about what anyone should do. I didn't even say that on the whole people in the USA pay less.

In the EU, people pay a varying amount (overall a greater fraction of their income) in taxes. In the US, people pay a varying amount (overall a greater fraction of their income) in healthcare. I think these are widely accepted facts.

The US healthcare system has endless problems, I was only commenting on the "double-dipping" part of my parent comment, not writing an essay.

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The 'Double dipping' is referring to the average US citizen having to contribute just as much as western europeans from taxes towards healthcare, and then on top of that having to spend just as much privately from personal or employers insurance, and cash. US healthcare costs are about double that of other nations and tax contributions at the same level.

Are you saying that taxes in the US don't vary by income?

I think I misunderstood your original comment. I heard "paying for one's own expenses plus for those who can't afford it" (which is same in the US and the EU), where it seems you mean "paying from taxes plus out of pocket".

My uninformed impression is that in the US one does not pay proportionately the same amount of taxes towards healthcare (maybe you have citations to the contrary?).

I would (only from experience and anecdotes) guess that you're right about it costing double, however.

> My uninformed impression is that in the US one does not pay proportionately the same amount of taxes towards healthcare (maybe you have citations to the contrary?).

Each and every report of US healthcare costs and funding. I'll just grab from the wikipedia article [0] for now.

> Public spending accounts for between 45% and 56.1% of U.S. health care spending.

And one of the pretty handy graphs [1]

Worth noting that this is with a lot of people unable to afford treatment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_finance_in_the_Uni...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/OE...

Edit: Has to be coupled with public spending in other nations to be complete. There is another article related to the graph [2] with another easy to understand graph [3]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/OE...

Your citations seem roughly in line with what I said and expected: Americans pay double overall, with a similar dollar amount of public healthcare.

Proportionately speaking, that means Americans are not taxed the same (higher incomes). Interestingly, based on what I'm seeing re: incomes, the /total/ healthcare expenditure is, as a proportion of income, the same between the US and western Europe.

Overall this seems quite unsurprising: healthcare is expensive, the US pays more and the government spreads it around less. Worth noting that health and lifestyle in the US is also "worse" (more cultural than healthcare related).

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