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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans.

No public health care? That isn’t true either. Medicaid and Medicare are public health care.

Another legitimate peculiarity of Americans is the vastly higher disposable income compared to most other countries. Even with all of the “free” stuff, the French have lower wages and far less disposable income than Americans.

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> No public health care? That isn’t true either. Medicaid and Medicare are public health care.

I think you know that "public healthcare" was referring to universal healthcare in this context. US is the only western democracy without universal healthcare.

Yeah that's what I meant. Too late to edit comment!

Switzerland and the Netherlands healthcare is private though people are obligated to get a plan. Works great and cheaper than here in France which is horribly expensive for anyone with a decent wage.

The Dutch and especially Swiss healthcare systems are actually among the most expensive in Europe. France is cheaper per capita.

Yes per capita, that's why I said "for anyone with a decent wage". France has one of the highest unemployment rate in OCDE, so for all these people it is indeed cheap, in fact free. But for those actually making more than the minimum wage (and for anyone making close to a SV salary or the French equivalent), you end up paying way way more than the Dutch and the Swiss.

> Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans.

I am afraid your data is outdated: it is now used for less than 15% of payments, mainly by old people or for C2C payments.

I am in my late twenties and have emitted only 3 checks from my account, in my entire life.

I had to use them years ago to pay some club for the kids (UK), and every time I was sweating - where do i write the amount? Where the name? Is it readable? Did I mark the end correctly?... Thank $deity banks phased them out.

15% is still a lot more than in many other countries. Checks are certainly on the way out, but in rural southern France, there are still places where you can pay with check but not with pin card.

The French have the RIB system, wherein you can send a snapshot of what your account details are, and the bills are automatically deducted from there. In practice, that means you need to use cheques MUCH less frequently than in the US. What's worse, the US doesn't have an easy way to transfer money electronically between banks! Thus requiring even more cheques.

Why would you need checks at all if you can just pay by card or transfer money using your bank online page?

It's often the other way around. Companies sometimes prefer to pay you, reimburements etc, via a cheque.

It's because the USA decided paypal was the way to do C2C transfers between banks and decided not to develop their own as a result.

You also have venmo, square cash, fb messenger, etc.

> The French have the RIB system

When living in France I never came across the use case you describe, at least not in this form. But I did often come across people wanting money from me sending their RIB as an image attachment to emails rather than copying and pasting their IBAN into the body of the mail like elsewhere in Europe.

That's more or less what I meant, except with utility companies instead of people. Apologies if I made it sound fancier. Having lived in the US and France, I think the places where cheques were used a lot was in bills-type things. That's why I brought this example up.

Don't forget we also spend less on feeding ourselves than anyone else in the world[0].

[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...

That's partly due to lower food standards, surely? Salmonella causes hundreds of deaths per year in the US but I believe almost zero in the US.

My guess would be agricultural subsidies more than food standards.

Really? The US spends about 1% of its budget on agricultural subsidies compared to the EU's 40%.

The EU's budget is tiny, though. It doesn't maintain armies, police, infrastructure, health care or any sort of social security. Farm subsidies are among the few things the EU spends money on. The rest is paid by member states. So this is not a meaningful comparison.

A meaningful comparison is difficult, granted. If anything, doesn't that make OP's point about food prices being low due to agricultural subsidies less tenable though?

No less tenable than the food standards proposition, unless you have data that shows the difference in industry expenditures on food quality.

I found a USDA publication [1] which is a little dated but raises a large number of factors that affect food household expenditure differences between the US and EU. Broadly speaking these are:

- Food prices inc. agricultural protection & consumption taxation;

- Income;

- Food availability;

- Consumption patterns;

- Preference trends inc. health, food safety, production process & taste;

- Demographic trends;

- Retailing & regulation (e.g. consolidation laws).

Some of the factors it highlights that may cause lower expenditure on food in the US than in the EU are:

- Lower food pricing due to protection & taxation;

- Food safety concerns in the EU since mad cow disease and dioxin in chicken feed (and foot & mouth disease in the UK) leading to lower confidence in food supply regulation;

- Greater willingness in the EU to pay more for higher animal welfare in the food chain;

- Higher proportion of organically grown food across the EU and differing definitions of "organic";

- Longer history of consolidation laws in the US.

Apologies I missed copying the actual reference in my last post: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/40408/30646_wr...

EU budget does subsidize infrastructure and some R&D grants.

If you are going to make inflammatory statements like that, at least back them up with data. Per Table 3[1], the Americans and Europe have roughly the same death rate from salmonella.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4668831/

It was inflammatory and for that I apologise.

Table 6 of p.10 [1] shows zero deaths from salmonella in the UK for the period 2006-2015.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

In the context of public healthcare the OP felt like an unwarranted and overly simplistic diversion, which I think is why I got frustrated.

EDIT: I also realised I typed "US" twice in my original comment; the second should be "UK".

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