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Comment by torh | Hacker News Reader

When I see the benefit the society gets here in Norway, I have no problem paying my taxes. Money well spent.

Better education and health care for my neighbors brings my quality of life up as well. But then again, maybe I live in a naive bubble.

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As a Swede I used to feel this way too, at least to some extent. But then I came to need the system for a period, and that has radically changed my view. It’s not so much that the healthcare and benefits you get are limited, I can accept that. It’s that these systems are full of nasty people who take advantage of their power to satisfy their own psychological needs, at the expense of the vulnerable (read: me 5 years ago).

Now I just have an uneasy feeling of being half-enslaved: I have to pay 60-70% of all the value I create into this system, and if I do fall seriously ill I could very well die on a park bench.

Sadly my conclusion is that I have to get out of here. I don’t think I could take another iteration of this without succumbing to bitterness.

Before you judge me think about the Fundamental Attribution Error: yes, I’m not exactly like you as a person, but more importantly I have information you probably don’t have (i.e. what it’s like to be at the bottom of this kind of society).

> these systems are full of nasty people

This is everywhere. Paying out of pocket does not fix this.

It does in one very important way: You don’t have to keep paying the exact people who victimized you.

You can change hospital/primary care though?

And any country has a connected system. If not taxes then its gonna be insurance.

> You can change hospital/primary care though?

By law, yes. In practice, no.

I think this is what may be hard to understand if you haven’t experienced it: if you fall far enough in Swedish society you are essentially dehumanized.

One more important difference: It’s terrible to die on a park bench because you can’t support yourself and other people won’t help you. But in my mind it’s worse to die on a park bench because the state extracted 60-70% taxes from you, and now won’t give you even a small portion of that back. To me that’s just inhuman…

>It’s that these systems are full of nasty people who take advantage of their power to satisfy their own psychological needs, at the expense of the vulnerable (read: me 5 years ago).

As a fellow Swede, elaborate?

If what I am going to healthcare for is REAL they take very good care of you. They know when it's serious or not. If you waste their time, gtfo.

That’s only true when they can identify with you. If you have very REAL health problems (e.g. drug addiction or serious mental health issues) you are essentially dehumanized.

Same in the Netherlands. I look around and think "yup, that's why I'm paying taxes".

What I can't fathom though, is what what goes on in England. They pay just as high taxes, and it looks like a dump. Broken roads, rubbish strewn everywhere, take-your-life-in-your-hands "healthcare system", soul crushing training camps posturing as schools, I could go on, but it's essentially every aspect of life. This has nothing to do with Brexit either, as it's been like this since I can remember, going back 30 years.

Same feelings here in Switzerland. Taxes are ok for the quality of life.

I've been in a bottom place myself and I wish everyone to get the help they need without further obstacles

I moved from a (nominally "first-world") country off this list to a country on the list (first class first-world) near the turn of the century; although I won't rule out moving back, it would have to be an extremely sweet deal to be enticing: I consider myself, not an expat, but an immigrant.

Let me ask, do you have a job with the countries median or average salary? Or you have a western job salary, and therefore you can live it up? Did you bring all your gadgets, pc, laptop, phone etc or did you buy those in the country or ?

What I mean is of course you will have it better in a third world cheap country if you come in with a western salary or even western tools already bought in from elsewhere.

Perhaps I wasn't clear: I immigrated to one of {AT, CA, CH, DE, DK, FI, IS, NL, NO, SE}, none of which are third world cheap countries. (and average salaries are also high in my home country, it's just that those [mean] high salaries, for whatever reasons, do not translate to [modal] high quality of life)

For sure. And that is how it should be. I absolutely love Norway and think that it is a beautiful country. But I also couldn't ever imagine living there because of the weather. So perhaps "quality of life" has much more to it than socialized healthcare and benefits. No?

TLDR: Love Norway and think they're doing it right. But also think that these rankings are broken.

Norway: The drug (oil) supplier that didn’t get high on its own supply..

With "quality of life" I mean that I don't feel like I have to protect myself from my peers. Kids growing up poor still get an education. Kids (mostly) have access to some sort of activity keeping them out of trouble. It's not perfect, but it's something.

With regards to the weather: "Winter depression" is a real thing for many (including me), and the health care system is still far better with physical issues then with mental issues.

But there is a safety net in place. When I broke my shoulder in 2017 I did not loose any of my income, and it didn't cost me anything in the hospital (with some exceptions). Still, I would prefer not to break the shoulder again. :D

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