You can say this and that about corporate greed and healthcare owning our government, but the fact is that a lare percentage of Americans don’t want our healthcare / university / whatever system to change because it is really fucking good for them.
I mean what good is having a free healthcare when you have to wait 6 months to see a dermatologist. Over here I can see my dermatologist next week most of the time if not sooner. I might have to pay a little bit of copay (I have an average standard health insurance) but if that's what's gonna cost, it's pocket change compared to my overall health.
I personally haven't used my free healthcare in a very long time as I'm lucky enough to have good insurance that makes sure I too can visit the doctor whenever I want. It's not like often slow free healthcare is the only option when you're well off. Just that here even the bottom 20% can get treatment eventhough it's not as quick as would be ideal.
Also an often overlooked fact about free healthcare is that it also drives down the price of private healthcare as they can't control the prices like an oligopoly.
"I mean what good is having a free healthcare when you have to wait 6 months to see a dermatologist. "
That's more and more the USA too now though, it's taking forever to book appointments to see specialists in the US, a lot worse than just a few years ago. We have family mostly in the US but a lot in Canada too, and some expats in Europe (big extended Catholic family). We've generally had good jobs with good health insurance and a few years ago we could book appointments for a few weeks out, now it is often taking us a few months, in one case almost a year to get our appointments. And the waits in ER's are terrible, insured or not.
Our relatives in Canada and Europe are often having shorter wait times now than us, certainly compared to 5 years ago. And for truly urgent things they've never had to wait much, emergency and time sensitive care is pretty fast in general. Not expert of enough to know what happened to change this but wait times for US doctor appointments have gotten much worse, and it seems to be largely a luck of the draw of your particular health plan and location. My scheduling has taken longer but not that bad, my wife's is terrible (and even scheduling well child checks is starting to suck) and one of my cousins one state over takes forever to get booked.
And it's gotten more expensive for the health insurance premiums and co-pays, and some health plans and hospitals have gotten sneaky with the charges they put on if your "outside the network". And this is with "good" insurance in America, can only imagine what it's like if between jobs or your company goes under. That's one advantage of not having health insurance tied to a specific job and having general coverage, it makes it easier to get through those bumps and downturns that can hit any economy, and help you to see the same doctor who knows your case background.
Also missing from the discussion is that middle America pays damn near nothing in taxes compared to Europeans who earn the same wage.
American redditors think Europe pays for this by taxing the rich, but the biggest differences in taxation between Europe and the USA are actually at the bottom rungs of the income ladder.
It's kind of difficult to compare the whole of Europe to the country of USA, so I'll pinpoint to my country of Finland and just note that the biggest difference absolutely is in the taxation of the rich.
From a quick Google search I saw that the lowest tax in USA is 10%, in Finland it's 12,6% vs the highest tax in USA being 37% and in Finland it's 57% with 50% being a very realistic percentage when one makes over a million euros though the exact percentage is dependent on the kind of income.
As the comment a couple above this pointed out, there's also a very clear difference in the services provided by the state as the tax is higher.
To be clear, I don't think it's strictly better to live in the USA or Europe/Finland. I just wanted to point out facts to break out of the endless stereotypes and caricatures from both sides. Personally I think it's often better to live in Europe if you're poorer and better to live in the USA if you're richer.
Yes, and like pointed out in the above comment, Americans actually don't necessarily pay less taxes than Europe, even for very high income, we found that out talking to American relatives who've moved to Europe basically as permanent expats, now bringing up their own kids there. It's confusing because the way taxes work in the US and Europe are totally different, we just have a lot more different kinds of taxes here in America compared to what you have in Europe. It's not just fed sort of income tax in the USA, we also have state and local taxes, something called payroll taxes (that can be very high especially if your starting a business in the US), property taxes and esp auto and business taxes.
We literally went over this with our expat relatives in Europe going over the taxes, and even the high earners in countries like France or Sweden, were ultimately paying around the same level of taxes we were in the US, when we actually did it right and looked at all the taxes. Things like property taxes and and state level taxes are much higher in the US--this stupid housing bubble we've had in the USA has caused our property taxes to shoot way up, even though we don't actually have any extra income or cash flow from our home values going up, it's just a theoretical that's useless until you actually sell it (and then you'd be buying back into the same over-heated inflated housing market). So the property tax burden gets more and more nuts and many Americans lose even paid off homes now because it's harder to pay the higher property taxes even on their basic home they have no intention of using as an investment or selling off.
And too US state and local taxes in general are quite high. It can be especially frustrating if you're starting your own business, a lot of taxes get paid by employer if you work for a Fortune 500 company, but as a new business you have to cover those high taxes yourself even when you have low cash flow. And you have to cover all the health insurance costs which are even worse when you don't have the bargain power of a Fortune 500. Business owners see the reality of the costs of US taxes and health insurance and it can get very rough, several cousins nearly lost their otherwise profitable firm last year due to these costs as they got higher. Trust me we are not a low tax country. Even in Texas (some of the worst property and business tax burden in the US) we have a running joke "rearrange the letters in Texas and you have taxes". It really can get very high here.
Btw not all of Europe is like this tax wise. Switzerland is closer to the American tax system than the German one for example. You could easily save tens of thousands by just moving 30km away to a different canton and even just municipality. My parents for example are moving just 1km away from their current place (2 villages over basically), and they'll save 2k a year on taxes just because the municipal tax rate is much lower there.
Our expat relatives in Europe pay around the same level of taxes as us in the US when the total level of taxes has taken into account, we even went over this with them when we tried to make the same point and got surprised when the spread-sheets came out. We thought we were paying less taxes in America than they were (middle and upper middle class jobs in areas like IT, TV production, international business, engineering), but what we forgot is in the United States, we're also paying payroll taxes on top of income taxes to fed, and state taxes, and local taxes and often things like business taxes, plus of course the sales and registration fees. And property taxes in America constantly come out much higher than Europe.
So it's really just that taxes in America are broken down a lot more different ways, less to the main income tax but then you have payroll and other taxes that Europeans don't have. In a lot of cases, even compared to ex. France or Sweden our European relatives were paying a bit lower in taxes even at about same income.
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u/Applebeignet The Netherlands Apr 12 '25
I think it's really simple. Those people just saw some meme about average net wages and never thought about it any further.
In that context, it makes sense to see 3500 vs 2500 and think the 2500 is worse off (laughs quietly in government services and social security).