| ▲ | ch4s3 4 days ago | ||||||||||||||||
> and basically all their costs are borne by the government The costs are born by people paying 20-25% VAT. The government just collects and disperses those funds. This may be more efficient, but the cost is born by everyone in society. > Compared with other countries, the inefficiency of for-profit healthcare The US health system(s) are a patchwork of non for profit entities, for profits, government programs, and employer sponsored arrangements. It's definitively not a single system and not wholly for profit. No one would ever intentionally design a something this we, it's accidental, it evolved over time. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jrmg 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
> The costs are born by people paying 20-25% VAT. The government just collects and disperses those funds. This may be more efficient, but the cost is born by everyone in society. Well, yes, all costs ‘borne by the government’ are in fact borne by people paying taxes - or government borrowing. [You could follow the chain even further and say that, of course, the cost of those taxes, borne by people, is people’s income, borne by their employers (or investments) but that obviously gets pointless and ludicrous pretty fast because the chain never ends…] Anyway, that’s not my point - the point is that the US government, in per capita terms, spends more (public money collected in taxes or borrowing) on healthcare than governments of countries where (almost) all healthcare spending comes from the government (public money collected in taxes or borrowing). Private spending is in addition to this. Again, spending by the US government is more than spending by other countries governments, even though the US supposedly has a private insurance based system (that also costs a huge amount in addition to government spending!) I looked up a source… https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-costs-how-the-us-... …and it turns out I’m slightly wrong - US government healthcare spending per capita is beaten by the governments of Norway, Luxembourg, and perhaps the Netherlands. But even they spend vastly less than the US if private spending is also considered. The US system is unarguably hugely more expensive - less efficient - than the systems of the entire rest of the developed world, for worse health outcomes. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | ImPostingOnHN 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Does VAT really go entirely to healthcare? If not, we'd have to compare with the total taxloads borne by citizens of compared countries | |||||||||||||||||
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