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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

I suggest you look at current income figures and try to come up with a plan where juicing the rich works. There's a reason Germany's 42% tax bracket starts at... €55,961

If you want to pay for these things, you need to bring your idea of who's gonna get taxed way, way down to earth.

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> There's a reason Germany's 42% tax bracket starts at... €55,961

Oooh, is the reason "because a lot of services are publicly delivered instead of privately", because I'll bet it is.

I pay $30k/year for private healthcare here in the US; a $2200/month premium and an annual out-of-pocket of $4k.

I'd happily accept a 10% tax hike to make that go away, and that doesn't even account for my kids' eventual college costs...

US healthcare is corrupt and inefficient. It's not only a debate about who should pay for it. Your comment suggests changing the latter would fix the problem with cost, which surely has a lot to do with the former.

It always makes me chuckle when people cite health care being inefficient as a reason to let the government run it.

(Not saying you're doing that, you just reminded me of it)

What is chuckle worthy about the government running healthcare? Plenty of countries have good government run healthcare system. Several studies have found that patients on Medicare are generally more satisfied with their healthcare than patients with private insurance. Government can run health care.

The us has low governmental capacity and lower trust then most other nations. We don't have a clear view of sovereignty between state and federal and have the most active judicial system in the world.

That's my point. You can totally have those things, just most middle class people will have to pay in, it cannot be built via taxing only some nebulous $100 million+ class.

It's a dishonest framing, though. The middle class already pays in, at an exorbitant rate that's twice the rest of the developed world.

Changing how we pay is different from paying more.

Employers can also stop paying $6,000/year[0] for middle-class health insurance and add that to middle-class paychecks, and then the government can take it in the form of taxes, to provide the health insurance.

The difference is that the cost savings should make this enough enough to cover EVERYONE, not just the upper-heeled middle class.

It's possible that quite a bit of the middle class may not notice a large difference in take-home pay even with an additional 10 percentage points of federal income tax.

0: https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/what-percent-of-health-insur...

Where's the remainder of your premium going to come from when you're only paying 10% salary for it? Private insurance companies sure aren't going to reduce their prices.

Can we stop pretending the rest of the developed world doesn't exist?

The per-capita healthcare spending of Europe, public and private, is about half what ours is with similar health outcomes. We are an extreme outlier.

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

The remainder of the premium stops going into the pockets of insurance middlemen.

> the premium stops going into the pockets of insurance middlemen.

This just replaces one middleman (insurance co) for another (government).

I can tell by the downvotes that my point whooshed over everyone's head -- my point was essentially yours. Changing who pays isn't going to change anything. We have to change what gets charged.

> We have to change what gets charged.

This is substantially easier to do in a single-payer style system.

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