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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

In Europe, many things are provided by the government and at high quality. This means their quality of life is better, even if they don't earn as much. They don't "need" a high income to have a nice life. It's really not that useful or relevant to look purely at numbers, it's what you get out of your current political system.

In the US, you need to make good money because everything is out of pocket. If you don't, your quality is life is poor. This is also why whenever Americans compare their life to Europe, it's always numbers based. It's all we know: big numbers, better life.

Not to mention things that are not easily qualified by pure numbers, such as work culture, vacation time, public transit.

Europe has vastly more progressive and people friendly political, economic system and cultural setup. This is speaking as an American in tech with a relatively high income.

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High quality when an American is in the room or high quality all the time? My experience with family members and their friends, who live in countries with many social services, is that they only call them high quality when Americans are present. The rest of the time you'd think they were being marched to the gulag when trying to make use of said services.

Americans oversell the quality of their healthcare. American healthcare is actually just as bad as "socialized medicine", we just spend more on it and have less access.

"But you have to wait months for a specialist in Canada!"

That's different from the US system, how? Have you ever tried to get appointments? We're also booking many months out.

"Want this live saving surgery? Let's see if insurance will cover it first, you might impact our profits. "

K...

It all sucks, but at least everyone gets it in some places as opposed to the system working for a privileged few. Ironically, the US does have socialized medicine, it's called Medicare, which is wildly popular.

The US healthcare system is one of the strongest arguments for government take over.

Top-tier medical care is useless if you can’t use it! This is a vital point many Americans don’t seem to get.

all those polls where people systematically support their national health services probably used tons of americans to influence the answers; i think you are up to something here

Here in Spain the free healthcare I receive is really great. I have nothing but good words for it no matter what the audience is.

Sure there's some waiting lists but when I have something that may be serious I get seen right away.

In the Netherlands I've also had great care and even subsidized housing when I was making minimum wage.

Maybe in the past your explanation was true. Looking particularly at Munich I must admit, it’s less and less welcoming city. 15 years ago it was doable to find a room or flat in the range 300-400€. Now double that with almost unchanged salaries. Getting doctor’s appointment with public health insurance is currently getting harder and harder. Now add skyrocketing energy prices, that will crush low income families. I just don’t see the Happy End in any scenario.

But don't you think people in Germany are more aware of the issue and more willing to find ways to actually solve this problem?

At least in Berlin there's been big movements towards controlling rent prices, building social housing, socialising the current housing that exists. Etc.

So although it is a problem, is it going to be a problem in 20 years? What's being done in the USA, as a counterpart, to solve these problems? Everyone talks about unaffordable housing in the USA but their zoning laws are still horrible. So any changes will have to go through that first.

In that regard, I think European countries are in a much better standing to solve these problems.

I don’t think, that Germans are capable of anything. Shitty railway tunnel in Munich needs 30 years for construction. The tunnel between England and France needed 6 years in comparison. There are no zoning laws, just big hole with lots of concrete inside. That sounds insane to me. Building a new district for 50000 people… I just can’t believe it might happen. It was done in Munich in the past, but now it’s lost knowledge. Like many other big infrastructure projects. Other countries meanwhile gained the needed skills and have no problems with infrastructure development.

This all feels very "I don't have the data to back up my assertion, so I'll just state it's true because your use of data makes it true"

I'll just state quality of life is flat out better in the US than Europe, and anything you use to show otherwise just proves that I'm right since you're just trying to reduce it to X metric.

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