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Comment by aengvs | Hacker News Reader

I've recently moved to the US from Australia. The amount my employer and I pay for my healthcare is significantly more than I paid in Australian taxes for healthcare. And that's before including my deductible, things my insurance doesn't cover and the amount I pay in US taxes for healthcare.

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In Australia, the government spends over $70B on healthcare, but collects only around $10B through Medicare levy surcharge. The only reason your healthcare spending in Australia seemed so low is because an overwhelming majority of the cost of healthcare in Australia is covered through general taxes, and not through the Medicare tax. Even if you focus on Medicare benefits only, the Medicare levy surcharge only covers less than half of the Medicare benefits.

That said, healthcare in Australia in fact is cheaper than in the US, but not as much cheaper as you think it is.

The US actually spends more per capita on health care than Australia both public and private https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

Yes. And US doctors make more "per capita" than Australian doctors. About twice as much. If they continue making more, I don't see how paying their billing rates from the taxes addresses the "affordability" problem. If you were to fix billing rates at a lower level (through single payer and such), you wouldn't really have any doctors to begin with, at least not for a while.

Doctors' wages aren't the biggest cause of higher spending. Admin costs and pharmaceutical spending are the largest (unnecessary) cost centers.

Citation needed. Most of _my_ medical bills go to the doctors.

I live in Australia and that doesn't seem out of the ballpark. I pay the equivalent of USD$1.3k a year in levies and USD$100 a month for health insurance. Australia doesn't have access to the same level of care either (for example, bleeding edge cancer treatments or experimental medicine).

I also pay substantially more in other general taxes (compared to the US), which ends up funding healthcare as well.

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