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The US spends more (16% Vs 10 GDP), but preventable mortality, life expectancy, people living with chronic conditions etc are all worse than other developed nations: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/05/26/a-comparative-ana... Plus the risk of being a victim of violence is higher in the US - you are 400% to 600% more likely to be murdered in the US than the UK, 700% more likely to be raped, 400% more likely to be robbed etc (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/internat...) so you're gonna need that hospital treatment more.
As for pay the legal minimum hourly rate in the UK is approx $16.90 Vs the US minimum of $7.25
Median annual salaries seems to be approx $62k US Vs $53k UK so it is 17% higher not 400%. When you adjust for purchasing parity (https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/OEMDC) it's more like 62k Vs 58k, or approx 8% more in the US. There are plenty of high-tech jobs in London, especially in AI & biotech recently (e.g. as an example I am quite "mid-to-senior" level (i.e. 2 to 3 promos away from "director" type levels, so more headroom.for sure) and my annual total comp is about 8-9 times the median UK salary for example, somewhere in the $450-500k range and I am not even an AI researcher, just an engineer writing web apps at a Big Co)
Can't deny that some parts of the US are warmer, but there are also colder places. UK is actually very mild climate-wise given it's latitude. I am married to a US citizen and our kids are dual national but there is zero zero zero chance of us ever living in the US for the above reasons. I work with loads of Americans who have permanently relocated to London, but it goes in both directions.
You really gotta look at how those numbers break down.
Who's killing who and where. Be in the right places and you're much safer than anywhere in Europe
Because sure, if you look at the right parts of the US, you can find zero homicide rate due to there not being any residents. You can also do this in Europe. It tells you nothing.
What may give you a hint about relative safety is that the UK police don't bother with being regularly equipped with firearms, because they don't need to be.
Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children.
More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence.
Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing outcomes in the OECD. You have relatively poor cancer treatment outcomes
I won't take any lecturing on societal ills from such a perverted system.
The US has recently declared being "anti-fascist" as a terror organisation. Bonus points: antifa isn't even an organisation.
> Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children.
Citation needed.
> More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence.
Yes, gun violence is grossly overrepresented in the fears of most people, compared to how big the risks actually are.
And yet, the life expectancy in the US (79.3) is younger than EU as a whole (81.7), and also in the UK (81.3).
> Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing outcomes in the OECD. You have relatively poor cancer treatment outcomes
Given the US has the lower life expectancy, this is unfortunate… for you, not for everyone else.
Also, for birthing outcomes, the phrase "throwing stones in glass houses" comes to mind:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?time=2001...
No, I’m saying almost the opposite.
Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country.
There are large, fully developed, highly populated parts of the US where you are very safe. Often moreso than places people assume are “safer” because they are outside America.
Do you think crime in Europe is evenly spread across the whole continent? Or even that it's a constant rate within any geographical division of any nation in Europe?
Small groups doing crimes mostly to each other is not a novel thing unique to the USA. The (approximately) power-law relation is the same in places where stats exist to study the question: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-017-0069-x/...
I used to live in the UK, and in my 35 years there I was victimised a total of twice, one of which was an unattended bike left outdoors overnight; the safe middle-class south of Havant just wasn't targeted by roving gangs from the "rough" estate of Leigh Park in north Havant, even though that was absolutely walking distance, and a short walk at that.
Are you Tucker Carlson?
Pretty much all those stats are irrelevant.
Seriously 62k? Try 3.5 times that and then you're in the ballpark. My healthcare expenses for the past few years have been less than 2% of my salary.
Y'all don't realize just how intensily our poor rural areas bring down the average while our HCOL areas tend to set the world wide standard you're trying to catch up to.
Oh and healthcare costs in the UK are obviously zero percent, paid for out of general taxation (there is no dedicated "NHS tax"). So those unemployed poor people with literally nothing pulling down the averages get better-than-US health outcomes from the NHS, and the exact same level of treatment as anyone else using the NHS would get. I get additional private healthcare too through my employer and it is also zero cost to me. No co-payments or any other things like that at all - all zero cost to me.
> Our facilities are far superior.
Then why is US life expectancy worse?
> In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
Unless "very subsidized" means "by 100%", the UK's "folks with little money", or indeed significantly more than national average income, are still doing better. NHS care for citizens is zero upfront cost, except for dentistry and prescriptions which total to 1% of the UK's health costs.
The claim about taxes is just plain false, when considered over the whole USA and not cherrypicking the most favourable states within it: the US federal spending on Medicare + Medicaid is around $4,352/person, state-level spending added around $1,105/person on top of that for a total of around $5,457/person, and remember this is before personal insurance and co-pay costs which are on top of that: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2024_federal_budge...
In comparison, the NHS spent around £3,482/person, at current exchange rates $4,643.66/person: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00...
If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%.
So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
As a percentage of my paycheck what you cited as Medicare/Medicaid is again very low. State taxes are basically 2-3% and in some cases $0 and/or funded through real estate taxes rather than income tax. This is actually one of the arguments for American universal healthcare. We can bridge the final gap of uninsured with about 1-2% more in taxes. It would still be much less than what most countries pay by a substantial amount while still maintaining 90% of the level of care.
Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
Do not cite flat numbers as some sort of gotcha. Obviously we spend more money on our own healthcare. We have more of it with fewer hours of labor.
> If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%.
So? The US federal taxes are not a constant dollar amount. Someone who earns $60k pays $5,020, someone who earns $150k pays $24,734, from the first tax calculator I found.
Same idea in the UK.
> So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
False.
The average person in the UK spends about half as many hours on health as the average person in the USA.
What you're comparing now isn't just the government taxation supported stuff, so you also have to include the insurance and out-of-pocket costs, which then brings the USA to a nationwide average of $15,474/person, i.e. 18% of GDP, compared to the UK's (in USD terms) $5493/capita or 8.9% GDP: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo... vs https://healthsystemsfacts.org/uk-consumer-costs/
> The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
I know all of that. What's your argument here? Mine is that the NHS costs roughly the same as Americans spend on just this alone, and the UK doesn't then need other spending on top.
> Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
False:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=line&...
Your argument is false.
Americans on average spend about as much per person as the average UK citizens spend on the NHS even though that care doesn't even reach all Americans because not all Americans are eligible for it.
You call an ambulance in the UK? Free*. You give birth in the UK? Free. When I was a kid and slipped into some ashes and burned an arm? Free care. When I was at university, hadn't gotten around to registering with a local doctor, had testicular torsion? Free surgery. Panic attack making me worried I was having a heart attack? Free both in the UK and again in Germany when I moved country. Accidentally peeled a finger on the inside of a tomato tin while making dinner (by this point in Germany)? Free treatment.
What do these things cost in practice in the US? I see the same viral bills as the rest of us, not lived experience, i.e. hundreds to tens of thousands for each of those things, and also reports claim the "average bill for a natural birth in the US comes in at $30,000": https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37555048
* to the user, obviously. "No bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective taxes" is functionally the same as "no bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective mandatory insurance". In fact, the UK calls it "National Insurance" though there's a whole argument about how correct the name is, while Germany it's literally a small list of mandatory-for-everyone-to-pick-one insurance corporations with so little room for manoeuvre between them they may as well be government owned.
"Yeah, well we have worse care, but nicer waiting rooms, so take that!"
It seems that you only care about how well you and your bubble are off and not others. As the young kids say it - sad.
Disregarding wealth inequality is the most trope-ey American thing you could possibly do.
Yet Americans cannot protest, because they are living from paycheck to paycheck. This is not in jest, this is the reason Americans trump up (ahem) when non-US citizens ask why they don't protest ICE and whatever other nonsense is going on.
Did you ever consider that you are in a bubble and most Americans barely have savings and are a healthcare incident away from poverty?
"The median American has $8,000 in transaction accounts (savings, checking, money market). [...] Only 46% of U.S. adults have enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses"
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/savings-account-ave...
Seems like not everyone can retire at 45 eh?