I have often wondered given the kind of cost involved in good health care in USA, along with college fees, why don't more Americans move to Europe for health care and education where it is probably free most of the time?
P.S.: I am from Pakistan.
P.S.: I am from Pakistan.
I'm living in Budapest partly for low tuition - my wife is Hungarian, which makes it less random than it seems.
Also, very few people in America can understand that life outside the United States could possibly be fulfilling. Or that tuition in much of Europe is free - I tell friends and family and they just boggle. There is such a strong feeling in the States that we have everything better than anybody else in the world.
When we were talking about moving to Budapest last year, I was asked by the plumber, "But is there enough food there?" He honestly believed, apparently, that everyone else in the world is starving except for the well-known massive foreign aid we provide. (That's tongue-in-cheek; most foreign aid is money specifically earmarked for the purchase of American industrial output, so it's really a handout to American industry, not to foreigners - and it's a tiny fraction of our annual budget to start with, but many people in America think that's where a substantial portion of their taxes goes.)
So, it's not just as easy as "let's pack up and move to the EU so we can get free healthcare tomorrow." Otherwise, you can imagine that every time a non-insured American got sick, they could compare the cost of getting new insurance to the cost of a plane ticket, and the plane ticket would win, I'm sure. =)
Packing up and moving is simply not an option for those who cannot afford to pay for healthcare in the US in the first place, and oftentimes logistics like family, employment, and language would prevent that anyway.