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by ceejayoz 2476 days ago
> It should come as no shock to anyone that in order to get Euro-level services, we need a higher tax burden.

This isn’t really true with healthcare. We spend 2-3x what Europeans do on healthcare per capita. We even spend about the same in taxes as they do, PLUS our immense private spending.

https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/snapshots-healt...
1 comments
rayiner 2476 days ago
We also spend more to get less than Europeans on many other dimensions. There is no reason to believe that we'll be able to cut costs to European levels when we can't do anything else for European levels of spending either. (For the same price as Maryland is spending to build a suburban light rail, Denmark is building a fully automated subway line underneath downtown Copenhagen with more track miles. The notion that just making the public sector handle healthcare will bring costs down to European levels is utter fantasy.)

At the very least, I think you have to assume we won't be more efficient than Europe in terms of getting healthcare spending down to a lower percentage of GDP. If we get healthcare spending down to 11.3% of GDP like France, we still have to find about $2 trillion per year in taxes to cover that cost.

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dragonwriter 2476 days ago
> At the very least, I think you have to assume we won't be more efficient than Europe in terms of getting healthcare spending down to a lower percentage of GDP.

At the same share of GDP, we’d still be vastly less efficient per capita.

> If we get healthcare spending down to 11.3% of GDP like France, we still have to find about $2 trillion per year in taxes to cover that cost.

No, you only have to find a bit under $0.8T, because public healthcare spending is already a little over $1.23T of the $2T it would be under that model. And I think people would be happy to lose ~$2.3T in private bills for ~$0.8 in additional taxes.

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ceejayoz 2476 days ago
> If we get healthcare spending down to 11.3% of GDP like France, we still have to find about $2 trillion per year in taxes to cover that cost.

Are you asserting $2T in taxes is somehow worse than the current $3.5T we pay for healthcare (taxes, premiums, out-of-pocket)?

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