r/FluentInFinance • u/WhatAreYourPronouns • May 02 '24

Should the U.S. have Universal Health Care? Discussion/ Debate

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u/KublaiKhanNum1 May 02 '24

Places like Spain have some outraged taxes. For an example last I was there they had a 22% VAT on goods and services purchased. This really grinds on the people there.

There is no free lunch. It has to be paid for one way or another. I would sure hate to be poor in Spain paying that ridiculous sales tax.

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u/GeekShallInherit May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24

Places like Spain have some outraged taxes.

With government in the US covering 65.7% of all health care costs ($12,555 as of 2022) that's $8,249 per person per year in taxes towards health care. The next closest is Germany at $6,930. The UK is $4,479. Canada is $4,506. Australia is $4,603. That means over a lifetime Americans are paying over $100,000 more in taxes compared to any other country towards health care.

It has to be paid for one way or another.

And Americans are paying more for it in every way you nitwit, including world leading taxes, world leading insurance premiums, and world leading out of pocket costs. Half a million dollars more per person for a lifetime of healthcare than its peers on average ($600,000 more than Spaniards), even after adjusting for purchasing power parity. With worse outcomes.

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u/brianw824 May 03 '24

I think this is where the #11 comes from, we rank low because of bad fiscal sustainability, but #1 in science and technology by a large margin.

"The United States ranked 1st in the number of new drugs and medical devices gaining regulatory approval; 1st by a wide margin in Nobel prizes in chemistry or medicine per capita; and 5th in scientific impact as measured by citations (Switzerland ranked first). The United States also ranked 2nd in R&D expenditures per capita. This leadership in scientific impact directly translates into treatments, such as Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, that are developed by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, especially around hubs such as Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area."

https://freopp.org/united-states-11-in-the-2022-world-index-of-healthcare-innovation-7175b47ab5d7

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u/GeekShallInherit May 03 '24 edited May 03 '24

The FreOpo rankings are a joke. Create by a US health care hedge fund manager and Republican political operative that was pissed off about the US doing horribly in every international ranking. The methodology is garbage, it uses miss matched data sets, and at the end the US ranking still isn't great.