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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where in the EU you are but I live in Germany and had to have cancer treatment a few years ago & got outstanding care for no cost. Also having two children the amount of support we (and everyone who has kids) get from the state here is excellent.

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This will last at most only 5-10 years more [1]. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Greece are brain-drained to the bone already. There is noone to come over.

[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/

This might be a fair assumption from a birth statistics viewpoint, but completely misses immigration.

I met a lot of brilliant people from all over the world during my undergrad at TU Munich; many of them stayed. Google, Apple, Microsoft have expanded rather aggressively over the past years, and the startup scene is growing. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt seem to follow suit.

Granted, it's much less likely (and also less politically incentivized) to become a "millionaire employee", but I guess ultimately, the correlation between wealth and wellbeing is simply weaker in (northern) European economies? As long as immigration policies don't change (and why would they? the current model aligns well with lobby incentives), I don't see much reason for this to change.

Also, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, and Greece have a different political and economic history than Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, etc.

I've worked at tech companies since we moved here in 2013 and at least for developers most of the "imported talent" were from non-EU former Soviet countries (Russia, Ukraine, etc), India or Latin America.

Holy shit, I knew from anecdotal evidences that young people from Spain and Italy were "fleeing" their country but the demographics are frankly scary !

I don't know how what the retirement scheme is implemented over there, but if it is generational (young gens pays for older gens) they willy have a BIG problem in 15/20 years ...

The population pyramids of Germany, Spain, Italy are interestingly similar while the economies of the latter two are in deep problems. Retirement age in Germany is 67, wait for it. Putting aside the tabloid hysteria I dare to presume that this was one of the main reasons of Brexit. The entire Europe will hiccup.

This is huge exaggeration and generalization. Some parts of EU are doing very well economically and have very quality of life. Cherry-picking specific countries does not represent the totality.

I live in the Netherlands and I pay nearly 150 / month in health insurance, my employer pays another heap, and on top of that I have a mandatory minimal deductible, medication that isn't on a list gets billed extra, and a lot of things are not covered by default (like glasses, physical therapy) or have a max coverage (like dental work).

> I pay nearly 150 / month in health insurance, my employer pays another heap

Not to digress too much, but it’s worth pointing out that it is you who is paying for both parts, even if only half of it gets listed on your salary slip.

Yes! this cannot be highlighted enough. It is scandalous that this is not listed on salary slips, this is an invisible tax and it makes people think insurance and health care have little cost.

Yup. My first time being in a leadership position I pushed to get better health insurance and to have my company pay for more of it. The CEO said something to the effect of, "This will be a 2% raise for our employees" which was true but not how I or probably any of the employees would have looked at it.

The same thing is done with Social Security and Medicare in the US. I hate it when governments try to obfuscate things like this.

in the US, the employer also pays a share of the employment tax (split in 2 between employer and employee) and doesn't always show you the true cost of benefits... all of these should appear and employee should be able negotiate the complete package (wishful thinking...).

I'm sure many countries do the same. See https://entreprise.pole-emploi.fr/cout-salarie/ for the true costs in France...

No, it's wrong: the employer is paying. The same goes for personal VS corporate taxes.

They apply financial pressures on different spots. Unsurprisingly, they have different effects on increasing o decreasing inequality.

No matter where you decide to draw the line that delineates which part of health insurance is paid by you vs. by employer - the amount of money that employer parted with, the amount of money in your pocket and the amount of money in healthcare budget remain the same.

There are two "sliders" - net salary, gross salary, then the total cost of the salary to the employer on top of the gross salary. One starting a job negotiates the gross salary. In EU positioning of these two "sliders" varies widely from country to country and one could rarely have mistaken impression that the contributions and deductions are low.

...but various balances of power change greatly.

The total spending on health care in the Netherlands in 2019 was €510 per person per month[1]. That need to be paid in somehow.

[1] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/24/zorguitgaven-stegen-...

I pay a lot more than you, but I'm ok with it cause it's a % of my wage and it means people much poorer than me get free/cheap healthcare. I'm not familiar with what is covered in the Netherland but here the normal public insurance really does cover a lot.

Not just poor people. Kids are insured by the ZVW premie which the employers pay for everyone. They are subscribed on one of the parents insurance but for the basic insurance this is free. Additional insurance can cost money for kids.

That's true! And when my wife was home when they were babies all 4 of us were insured on my contribution alone.

I can't tell if you're bragging or complaining.

But compare to the US: I pay over $2200/month in health insurance (and company pays more on top of that). And of course there's a lot of stuff the insurance won't cover so it's typically an additional 4K-8K out of pocket on an average year.

Yeah, people really underestimate how good a deal they get from government programs.

When I was studying in Austria there were still tuitions for universities (it was later made free) but they were just 350€ per semester and people were complaining about having to pay for their education - I had to laugh/facepalm because that was such an insignificant amount of money compared to what students pay in places where the government doesn't automatically pay the lionshare of their tuition for them.

> nearly 150 / month in health insurance, my employer pays another heap

This contribution is in line with public health insurance in Poland, which in practice doesn't cover any services and is completely disfunctional. German one which actually delivers is twice as much.

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