This is the thing that drives me crazy. Especially with those "I don't want my money going to pay for the wrong kind of person's healthcare" idiots. It already does. You already pay for that. Private healthcare is socialized healthcare except with some rich dumbass acting as a middleman so he can scrape a ton of money out while denying grandma that new hip she needs in the name of profits.

Just because you call it an "insurance fee" and pay more than if it was called a "tax" doesn't somehow make it better.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 42 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Your taxes would go down, actually. The federal government pays more now than they would with a Single Payer healthcare system, because it turns out allocation and claim management for hundreds of millions of people, and allowing insurers and pharma to be price-makers, is more expensive than just giving the hospitals what they need on a regular basis.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 weeks ago

many proposals have zero cost (or net zero, via offsetting tax credit of at least as much as the health care 'tax') for lower income earners. if this guy's only got 25% being withheld from each paycheck, he'd probably fall under that threshold.

[–] GraniteM@lemmy.world 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Here's Life Expectancy vs. Healthcare Expenditure, and there you can see Americans on average living about as long as people in Turkey or Poland while spending dramatically more than people in Germany or Switzerland.

[–] kokopelli@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

That’s both interesting and disheartening

[–] Forbo@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 weeks ago

We're already paying more money for worse care. So dumb.

[–] DrMorose@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

With my portion and my companies portion, it would almost be the equivalent of what Germans pay in taxes for all the programs they have over there. I think most are in the same boat we just don't realize that we are getting fucked or we do but we don't realize by how much.

It was an eye opener to actually look at it since your health insurance is taken from your paycheck before you actually see it so most people don't even think about it.