I agree... assuming no health/personal catastrophes for you or your family, stable employment, and good training in financial planning. Those are some big assumptions.
Not really, the vast majority of those living in first world nations don't have catastrophic events that ruin them financially.
Also, you don't need 'good training in financial planning', you just need the same amount of common sense my grandparents had - spend less than you earn, and set something aside for a rainy day.
Then my hands started hurting and I found out i had vikings disease... i type for a living. first process cost about a grand, insurance doesn't cover much of it.
Now both my hands are worse off and i'm looking at another surgery which will cost more that insurance won't cover.
My wife got into a car accident and we need two cars since i work and she home schools.
My parents are assholes and don't give a shit about myself or my family and my wifes immediate family is all dead. We inherited nothing. Raised 2 kids by ourselves, no grandma/no grandpa, no aunts, no uncles.
The world is trying hard to really fuck people over, and i've managed to stay on top of it.
Now my kids need jaw surgery and another needs teeth work - dental coverage is a joke. The jaw surgery is going to cost 5 grand and the others dental is 1700.
My property taxes are going up year over year. Maintenance costs are going up year over year, salaries have gone up but not as quickly and the tax relief was a joke.
spend less than you earn sounds esier on paper than reality of living.
we downsized our homes, we don't have cable tv, i use a company phone for cell phone, i'm always having to reduce my 401k contributions and even when i try and rollover my prior 401ks that shit is perpetually frozen and no matter where i turn or what I do it seems something is trying to stop me or block me.
it's not as easy as people make life out to be
I remember being so poor growing up that I used my first paycheck to buy a loaf of bread and a tube of cheap sausage and it was the first time having anything approaching a real meal in a few days.
Costs happen. Kids get sick/injured, cars get damaged or break down, taxes only ever increase.
I save aggressively, consistently live below my means (not miserly, but frugally), do all of the home maintenance and car work I can do safely and legally, and cook almost all of my meals at home from relatively basic ingredients.
And you know what? I have a pretty damned good life. I had to move across the US to a place with a lower cost of living and better job opportunities. My wife had to switch careers. I had to work several years at crappy jobs.
When you buy a thing, evaluate it's lifetime cost. When something breaks, fix it quickly and correctly. Avoid unnecessary costs. Prefer mending to replacing. Save for the unexpected, and then save some more. When dealing in dangerous waters (legal troubles, real estate, complex investments or financials), hire a skilled expert, even if it means lowering your quality of life. Keep enough insurance, and do the work to get multiple quotes or bids for any kind of job.
Our system is designed for people to fail. Even our own president has bragged that another depression would be a good thing since he could buy things up at a discount. (yeah, there is a tweet for everything)
Germany: 15%
Australia: 11.6%
France 11%
UK: 9.7%
US: 8.5%
Edit: also people wanting it and the financials of it being practical are entirely coupled together. My point was I don’t see how someone can not be for the idea of health care for all.
we also have strangely intimate relationships to our doctors. we stick with them even when were not sure theyre doing their best for us. we fear an "anonymous" doctor who doesnt know us personally.
these fears are exploited with imagery like "death panels," where faceless government bureacuracies let people with uneconically feasible conditions die untreated.
to reverse this requires stories of success from Europe told without smugness. many memes are tonedeaf humblebragging about euro healthcare that instantly turn off americans.
Lol, that's honestly pathetic - I hope it's not true.
A good idea is a good idea. You are talking about public policy here.
Or is it more common people go along with a emotionally-resonant personality and dismiss their reliance on facts and figures based on intuition?
You can be sure when I buy computer parts, numbers are the bottom line, but what if an ad for, say, an SSD offered a great price and excellent performance. Would you still buy it if next to the price tag, it said that if you did so, you're pathetic?
We prefer the private "Free Market" death panels. (Health Insurance), which effectively do the same thing. But you get a choice in who will deny you cover if you ever go over a limit or could not afford you cover.
What does that have to do with the issue? Germany has mandatory healthcare insurance, and I'm still free to choose my GP and specialists.
My wife got into a car accident and we need two cars since i work and she home schools.
Why does homeschooling require a car?
I live in Austin Texas, you need a second car to survive. Getting wife and 2 kids around town for everything in uber/lyft isn't economical and my wife also runs a not for profit and volunteers with charity and runs events and I have after work activities such as volunteering for first robotics, girl scouts and such.
"Homeschooling" doesn't mean "never leave the house".
I can appreciate having a car can be useful, but I'd not call it a necessity. Perhaps things are different in the US of A. The perceived poverty threshold is a lot higher. In many countries, if you have clothes, a roof over your head, and can eat regularly, you're good.
American urban planning is heavily car-centric. They talk about "walkable communities", because the opposite is the norm. A large proportion of American towns and suburbs are sprawling, low-density and strictly segregated between residential and commercial developments. Public transport is often meagre or nonexistent. Parts of America are practically uninhabitable without a car. It's probably true to say that Americans are unreasonably attached to driving and averse to walking, but at this stage it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
It is not your fault, and it sucks. But the fact of the matter is that ~MOST people don't end up in as unlucky of a situation as you ended up with.
Your unluckyness is the exception, and not the rule, and the vast majority of people don't end up in horrible, life-changing medical situations.
At the end of the day, someone's life is still wrecked through no fault of their own, and "the system" — which is us — just stands there, all, "Sucks to be you."