| In the UK you also pay insane taxes and your _median_ citizen in the UK has far less disposable income after all expenses including healthcare, according to OECD metrics. In software engineering specifically, I'd make a third of my current income in the UK. I'd much rather make 3x as much in the US and still get free healthcare through my employer, with shorter waiting lists and better treatment outcomes than the NHS. And we also have "skip the line" services here as well. My family have worked as doctors both in the UK (NHS and private), and the US, and they vastly prefer the US system from an outcomes and efficiency perspective. --- Commonwealth Fund studies like the one in the article tend to be quite biased and pushing a very specific agenda. But in reality, we have far better mortality rates (1) for serious diseases: 48% better outcomes for cancer, as an example. When people with serious problems want treatment, they come to our system if they can afford it, because we actually do have better outcomes regardless of what these highly biased studies say. 1: https://www.politico.eu/article/cancer-europe-america-compar... --- Edit: People calling my argument a "strawman" should really try living in both systems for a year with a chronic, serious health condition. They will very quickly find that the US system is far better than the NHS. We get seen more quickly, our doctors can afford to actually spend time on us, more effort goes into root-causing a problem, we have more treatment options, etc. It's easy to theorycraft online and look at the "on paper" metrics from highly biased studies and come to the wrong conclusions. |
Is this topic for discussing health care systems or the SW engineering salary dick measuring Olympics? Because those are two different unrelated topics.
Which country pays its software engineers the most is not some yardstick for measuring national quality of life of its average citizens, and whether SW engineers get paid a lot is totally irelevant to the people who are not working or aspiring to be SW engineers.
I bet the disabled US vets, homeless people or McDonalds workers in the states also don't give a fuck that their SW engineers are the best paid in the world but would probably feel a bit cheated learning that despite living and paying taxes in the richest country in the world, their peers in poorer EU countries get much more benefits and better quality of life.