[jrk_]

Not sure which part of Europe you are speaking of, but I have to pay around 15% of my income for the (mandatory) insurance, which then provides me with (almost) unlimited health care. If you are unemployed it is a lot harder to get health benefits, especially if you are a foreigner and haven't worked (==payed for the insurance) before. Just saying, that it's not like "come here, we have free health care and everything".

Anecdotally I can tell you that I also need regular medication (not in the same range as you, but still), and I was unemployed after college for some time. I got the meds, but only because my parents paid the minimum "social tariff" for health insurance, which is around 150€/month.

[facetube]

One of our (US) employers pays about 10% - 15% of our combined total compensation (read: salary plus "other personnel expenses") for a $250 deductible health insurance plan. And that's just the insurance premium. Dental is extra. 20% co-pay. Bills are always a surprise and full of errors. Sometimes the same service is coded in radically different ways, leading to claim denials and hundreds of dollars of variation in what's billed. It can take six months for a provider to get paid. People here routinely finance life-preserving medical treatment using credit cards. The per-practice administrative overhead for dealing with private insurance claims is estimated by quite a few (peer-reviewed) papers at between 15% and 30%.

If the wrong one of us changes jobs, all of this comes crashing down and I'm back to reading 200-page policies, figuring out what network I'm now in, and trying to determine if I can still see my normal doctor.

15% of after-tax income for no-questions-asked health care, sans any form of billing, sounds like a utopia to me.