Public health care doesn't mean that nobody pays for it. Since he's not employed by anyone else, it's part of the ~15% in mandatory fees that he'll end up paying in addition to the ordinary income tax.
1) The grandparent argument that being employed would be great because of health care benefits assumes that the creator of Minecraft lives in the US. If he had bothered to read the first sentence of the actual article, he would have discovered that this is not the case. In this place, we read the articles before commenting.
2) What 15% fees? Health care in Sweden is financed through regional income tax.
No, health care in Sweden is not solely financed through regional income tax. Large parts of the social security system are financed through payroll taxes and corresponding mandatory contributions from self-employed people (the latter is called "egenavgift" -- feel free to Google it).
But looking again, he's in fact born before 1983, which means that he has to pay pension contributions as well, bumping the total contribution up to nearly 30%. In addition to income tax, that is.
I'll trust you on taxes and fees for small companies, and I actually had no idea that employment fees went to healthcare, I thought it all went to pensions and unemployment. Thanks for correcting me! :-)
Anyway, I can see how the grandparent comment could somehow be right because of the technicality of how Markus' current company is set up, but his assumptions were still flawed, and he still didn't read the article. And 3 million € is still gonna be a pretty nice sum even after Swedish taxes.
I think the parents point was that health care in Europe is substantially cheaper than in the US. We pay similar rates of tax to in the US, but get Healthcare in that as well.
I would venture that if (as someone else suggested - I have no idea if its true) this developer will end up paying for healthcare as a fixed percentage of his income his healthcare would actually be substantially cheaper in the US.
Of course that doesn't necessarily extend to less successful developers.
2) What 15% fees? Health care in Sweden is financed through regional income tax.