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Comment by elnatro | Hacker News Reader

Well, it’s not that we (Europeans) are “advanced”. It’s more that having a socialized healthcare program is common sense for us. A for-profit company cannot be left in charge of treating patients as there are few patients that could need expensive treatments. No company would want to treat this people.

Other point I would like to make is that our healthcare is not “free”. It’s paid by high taxes be are obligated to pay to the government (the taxes are as high that I don’t even want to know the exact amount in my case but is around 25-30% of my salary).

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As a concrete example, German programmer here. 16% of my income go to taxes, another 12% go to mandatory insurances (excluding healthcare), and about 6% go to health insurance. So about a third of my income goes to mandatory stuff and taxes, but when my son broke his arm in the schoolyard, the treatment was completely free for us. Not sure how those numbers transfer to the US, though.

You would have paid less in taxes and it would have been free besides maybe a small ish deductible although you typically hit that through doctors appointments, drugs etc. The people who are screwed by the american system are the poor people make too much for medicaid. Everybody else generally likes their insurance.

The thing is though, taxes in the US aren’t any lower, if you include healthcare premiums as “tax”, at least for middle class people.

I wonder how well would things turn out if people were given the choice to opt out of public healthcare. You don't get taxed on it but also cannot use it (except in ER situations obviously).

I'd imagine that most people would stay signed on but it does give people who either distrust public institutions or just don't feel like they would benefit from a public option a choice.

Full disclosure: I am firmly on the side of socialised medicine.

We have public hospitals already. People happily opt out. They’d opt out even harder if there was a tax break.

Yes but that's not really the same thing as real nationwide public healthcare. Going by my experiences in the UK at least, people tend to have a lot of pride with them even if they also will complain about issues with it.

It's considered political suicide to even openly discuss dismantling the NHS which is why even the Tories continue to tip toe around the issue even after having been in control of government for more than a decade at this point.

Depends where.

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