[wqaatwt]

> EU have free healthcare and education

They are not free, the costs are deducted from the gross income listed above. Not that fundamentally different than employers paying for your health insurance (besides the system being way more efficient etc.)

[SXX]

Whole point is that as expat in developing countries you'll have to DIY your own healthcare. And education if you have children. And pay commercial prices.

And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.

[ElFitz]

> And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.

As it is in most if not all of the world? Free, high quality, public education is a rare thing, in most countries, even fully developed expensive ones.

Even when the schools themselves are nominally free you see well-off highly educated people do their best and pay a very large premium to get to live into the proper, usually expensive, neighbourhoods so their kids can live in the "right" school district to get into the "right" school.

Which is just paying a premium for supposedly better education. An indirect education cost.

And that is on top of the taxes deducted from the gross salary figures I mentioned, which are, in part, used to cover said "free" education.

[wqaatwt]

To be fair if you are an English speaker and move to medium/lower CoL central/eastern/southern European country you will mostly have the same concerns and will realistically have to pay commercial prices for the most part.

[mfuzzey]

Yes of course someone pays for it, in this case your deductions as you say. But I think there is a fundemental difference to employers paying for health insurance in that it doesn't depend on your job. So if you lose your job you don't lose your healthcare so companies can't use that as a way to retain you.

And the actual cost of healthcare to the organisations paying for it is actually far lower than the US system, probably partly because it's more regulated and also because there is far less litigation so insuranace for doctors is cheaper.

So I don't think the US system is "more efficient", unless by "efficient" you mean in extracting money from patients / their insurances. In the US hospitals exist to make money, in the EU it's more about providing treatment.