We're not quite there yet with the data we have :). Anecdotally though, it seems like companies in Europe pay less and take out more taxes.
Just want to point out that there is a good reason for the higher taxes.
For example, my first job was 25 days + 8 days of bank holidays and then you could earn up to 5 extra days if you stayed with the company long enough. Other jobs were all 22 + 8.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement
As a proportion of GDP, Government spending in the US is only a couple of percentage points lower than the UK. The US actually spends slightly more on public healthcare than the UK, 7.9% vs 7.3%.
Of course healthcare here is so horrifically inefficient that another 8.5% of GDP is spent privately...
We may pay more tax, but I'm glad we have the backup system that keeps you going when you're sick or unemployed.
American also has Social Security & 401k (pensions) and health care for the old (medicare) / poor (mediCAL, medicaid), and some social services (public school, various state programs in california)
I am less compassionate than the other folks in Europe and would really prefer a more capitalistic system at least in my country. But we Europeans are....ehhhh.
And expect corruption in the private system, too. There's no other explanation for $500 aspirins :-)
If you can get in the healthcare industry in the US you'll be a genius. Or probably a criminal, there's no legal way to get out of the current status quo without government intervention.
I like the free market, but you're oversimplifying reality.
Personally, I rather pay a 10% tax to cover healthcare rather than 20% of my salary to insurance premiums.
https://docs.google.com/a/hackbinary.com/spreadsheets/d/1aMx...
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthc...
That tax is buying us stuff.
Comparing pre tax income is more useful, by and large.
And how the buggery are you managing to spend £2300 a year on health insurance in the UK? That's crazy expensive. Ok, it's less than people in the US pay, but it's still mad for UK.
The health care expenditure in the US is the biggest in the world but that's including all the prices that insurance companies pay for treatment and services. If the US stops charging 3000$ for an MRI scan it's expenditure will go down drastically (an MRI costs about 300$ in most European countries) but it might not have any affect on what the individual ends up paying.
I suppose prices could have increased a fair bit since then. Also, I note you're in London. I'm in Scotland, so we actually have a different NHS, and it does generally get rated higher than NHS England.
I can compare public healthcare spending as that's the money that comes out of your taxes. Americans are taxed more for their public healthcare than we are in the UK for the NHS. They also pay more for private healthcare than we do in the UK. So your claim that it's more expensive here is simply wrong.
(EDIT: I'm certainly not saying this is a bad thing.)
Which makes it worth it, imho.
Except it isn't, anything you want to do there is ridiculously expensive
I think it's not true that the ACA caused that reduction (the recession is probably a much bigger factor), but it also didn't cause prices to increase faster than they were prior to the ACA.
That's great! I wouldn't way to be one of the few people able to afford healthcare in a world full of sick people who can't afford to get well...