from Hacker News

US Workers Are Paying High Taxes. But Without Any of the Benefits

by mjfern on 4/14/19, 5:25 PM with 76 comments

• by mrep on 4/14/19, 6:53 PM

  Discussed 5 days ago with 504 comments (same author and article, just a different website): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19609191

• by strstr on 4/14/19, 6:55 PM

  This isn’t surprising in light of [0]. The core statement in [0] is that american health costs are high. In particular, predictably high based on Actual Individual Consumption.

  [0]https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything...

• by ggregoire on 4/14/19, 7:11 PM

  Salaries in the US are more than twice as high as salaries in Europe tho. Maybe not having any benefits is a part of the equation to get those salaries? (naive suggestion, I'm not an economist)

  (Source for the salaries: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/average-salary-information...

  $28,000 for no high school degree -> people with BS gets this kind of salary in Europe. $37,000 for high school degree -> people with MS gets this kind of salary in Europe. Same logic for the other salaries on this chart.)

• by anonymous5133 on 4/14/19, 7:40 PM

  If you look at the federal budget, it is easy to see that the federal government is misallocating a significant amount or tax money to purposes that don't really benefit the average American. Interest on the national debt and military spending are the two big ones. There are probably also wasteful spending in most of the other programs as well.

  Then there is the issue of too much inefficiency within existing insurance programs. American consumers are not getting a good value for the healthcare dollars that they do spend.

  Lastly, I would say that the American education system is too expensive and too inefficient at training new medical staff.

• by AnthonyMouse on 4/14/19, 6:44 PM

  > As the Mercatus Center noted last year, by implementing a Medicare for All system, the US could insure 30 million more people, provide dental, vision, and hearing coverage to everyone, and virtually eliminate out-of-pocket expenses, all while saving $2 trillion over the first decade of implementation.

  This is assuming Medicare would have the same cost structure if it insured everyone that it does right now, which is incorrect because Medicare is currently being subsidized by private insurance.

  In order to make healthcare in the US cost less, something that is currently being paid for has got to go away. That isn't primarily "insurance company profits" or anything like that. The profits are a single digit percentage of the premiums.

  The costs come from things like the extraordinarily high cost of getting FDA approvals reducing competition between pharma companies, doctors choosing unnecessary tests for liability reasons and patients preferring them when someone else is paying for them and things of that nature. It is not clear how Medicare would change any of that, given that it currently doesn't solve them even for existing Medicare patients, it just pays below its share of the fixed costs and lets private insurance pick up the difference.

  You have to actually get the costs down. In theory you could just declare by fiat that you aren't going to pay as much, which would cause something to be cut, but not the inefficiencies that the law continues to require. A "solution" that causes good things to be cut so that existing wasteful things will still fit into the budget is not very good.

• by dgemm on 4/14/19, 6:44 PM

  Everyone knows this but those that benefit from the status quo also have enough influence to keep it.

• by stunt on 4/15/19, 6:35 AM

  Reading the history, They did a great job to make people pay tax without asking question.