[kalkut]

> The top 1/4 in the US have easy, fast access to some of the most elite medical care on the planet. And if you're making $142k in salary in the US, your healthcare is entirely paid for.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the top 25% earners have access to healthcare. The point of public healthcare is to make sure that the remaining 75% will not get indebted to barely survive.

What would worry an European worker would be :

- What would happen to my (and eventually wife's and kids') access to healthcare if I lose my job ?

- What if I want to start a business ?

- What if I want to go back to college ?

- What if I have to take care of a family member full-time ? Who protects me and this member ?

I am sure US medical care is very elite but what I also see is that a very large part of people who fell into poverty in the US did so because of unexpected health problems that would be taken care of in most European countries.

[growlist]

There's also the holiday, or rather lack of it - there are many things about the UK I could grumble about, but every other Anglosphere country seems to have worse annual leave.

[seanmcdirmid]

3 weeks is common for USA tech companies now. What is it in the uk?

[simonswords82]

We give our staff anything between 25 days to 30 days paid holiday. In addition they receive 8 paid bank (aka public) holidays a year. So that's a total of between 33 and 38 paid days off.

[seanmcdirmid]

The USA has bank/federal holidays also (around 10/year).

[dragonwriter]

Public holidays (federal or state) in the US are not obligatory for (and many are often not observed by) private employers.

[seanmcdirmid]

Sure, but most tech companies will give you them anyways. If we are talking about what we get for half the pay in the uk, vacation isn’t it.

[blibble]

the statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks paid holiday/year

and it's for every employee, including those not working for tech giants (e.g. people stacking shelves in supermarkets)

if you normally work 5 days/week that's 5.6*5 == 28 days paid holiday/year

(and this is the minimum, so most jobs give you more)

[seanmcdirmid]

How much does a tech company in Cambridge or London usually give?

I had around 4 weeks at Microsoft (3 weeks + 5 seniority days).

[blibble]

I've had tech jobs in Cambridge and London, and they've all been 25 + 8 public/bank holidays

so 33 total (6.6 weeks)

[seanmcdirmid]

If we are including bank holidays, then I got around 4 weeks + 10 days off in the states.

[walshemj]

25 plus public holidays is normal though can be more I started on 30 at part of Relex - you also in start ups you often get an extra day on your holiday.

Civil servants also get a privilege day - it used to be two half days Queens Birthday and Maundy Thursday

[monksy]

15 is the bare minimum for USA tech companies. I've seen a few not so stellar places offer 10.

[yayana]

Maybe in the right subsections. But 10 days for the first 2-3 years is very common and many companies argue they need consistency across staff.. then others offer you more or infinite vacation then give you a manager from hell with absurd deadlines to make sure you don't take any.

It's much nicer to live in a country with clear employment laws. (Particularly since not everyone around you will work in tech.)

[seanmcdirmid]

Tech companies have to compete on 15. They can’t just offer fewer than Facebook google Microsoft Apple etc....

Some companies BS on unlimited vacation, but I ignore those unless I trust them alot.

[ryandrake]

If you've seen places that offer 10, then 15 is by definition not the bare minimum. In my experience, most places offer 10 days, and often it's PTO (combined vacation + sick leave).

[jimmy1]

Misunderstood the question

[NLips]

Pretty sure all the parent's questions were healthcare related:

[What happens to my healthcare] if I want to start a business?

[What happens to my healthcare] if I want to go back to college?

...

[kalkut]

EDIT: Parent edited while I was writing this but I let my original post for the sake of the argument

I think you misunderstood my question, sorry if it was not clear : What kind of healthcare do I have in those situations ?

In most of Europe you have access to very good healthcare with no conditions attached. You get covered in all those situations. Of course if you are a young single tech worker with no health issue this does not feel important but accidents happen, illness happens.

I mean it is great that the US is 2nd for being pro business but being in pre-brexit UK, Germany or France don't harm your business prospects. I worked for smallish French companies (~20 employees) whose customers were mainly Americans it never seemed that it was a problem.

I mean you propose

> Most companies pay for your college, or if not the entire term, at least 2 years. You could also go to one of our excellent community colleges for peanuts.

Here if you manage to join our very best engineering schools you get paid for attending. The rest is not higher than 1000$ and the most expensive schools are business school with tuitions of at most 20k$/year. We also have online courses. And degrees are less and less important everywhere in the western world. I am a college dropout and it never hurt my career in Europe

Or you say

> Outside of the heavily taxed Northern European countries, not many countries in Europe take care of you and your family member full time outside of some fringe benefits

For the sake of the argument, let's assume that as you say it is not that common in EU. The good thing here is that neither you nor your family member will have to pay absurd amount of money for healthcare and as I said above

> "a very large part of people who fell into poverty in the US did so because of unexpected health problems that would be taken care of in most European countries."

See : https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2017/05/...

"medical debt is the No. 1 source of personal bankruptcy filings in the U.S., and in 2014, an estimated 40% of Americans racked up debt resulting from a medical issue."

I (personally) don't believe that a country can be a meritocratic society if getting ill at a bad moment in your life requires you to take "that extra 30% of your income you are not taxed, and opening up a high-yield portfolio for a rainy day" to pay healthcare bills that are way higher that in Europe.

I mean even without healthcare insurance whether public or private : A surgery at the hospital I was born in cost 1660,43 €. Any surgery. They have a price for what they call "Costly Specialty", it is 2734,85 €. So you are not European or you don't have any healthcare insurance, this is the worst case scenario for you here. We can do the comparison for almost every treatment and even without insurance it is ridiculously way cheaper because of the bargaining power a state who provides healthcare to millions of people have vs big pharma.

The thing that you seem to miss with your high salaries (here in tech) is that you spend a lot of money paying people with high salaries (here health professional) so they can pay back their excessive college debt, that allowed them to pay some the most expensive universities in the world.

And this pattern is everywhere when you deal with american knowledge economy including 150k$ tech workers who most likely have an education related debt. How indebted fresh graduates are supposed to live in one of the most expensive area of the world and to pay off their debt without this kind of salaries ? Now compare that to a debt free engineer at 75k$ living in Berlin whose only future debt "risk" is a mortgage

And if it really was an issue this same person could close the gap in revenue by becoming a freelance or working for a Swiss or Luxembourgian company as a remote or trans-border employee since we have a free-market with freedom of movement across more than two dozen countries.

So I don't say that to convince you that you need public healthcare and public education nor that EU is better. I try to make you understand that in reality an European engineer with a "75k$ in EU vs 150k$ in US" kind of choice will not care because in the end it is the same thing. In the end US and EU have quite different economies, very different social structures and very different labor laws. Labor markets take all of that into account into the wages.

Now for the stock there can be an important difference, I always had shares in my previous companies and I know that big companies give some too. I don't know if FAANG gives stock in EU. I doubt that we have many EU companies that gives as much stock but more importantly I doubt that there are many company anywhere in the world including in the US whose performance in stock exchanges is as good as FAANG's

[robk]

Then they just come back to Europe when they want those perqs

[ben_w]

My girlfriend accidentally moved from the UK to California because when her parents paid for her to visit, she didn’t have enough money saved up to come back afterwards. I’m visiting her next week, and sure, if there was an emergency we could sort something out… most people aren’t that lucky.

[dragonwriter]

> My girlfriend accidentally moved from the UK to California because when her parents paid for her to visit, she didn’t have enough money saved up to come back afterwards.

That sounds a lot like an immigration violation, if she wasn't a US citizen to start with.

[ben_w]

Dual nationality.

[blibble]

that hack doesn't work as non-resident British citizens are not eligible for free NHS treatment (other than accident and emergency)

they would be charged in the same way an American would

(the same is true for education subsidies)