Except that through taxes, your coverage is not dependent on your contribution and your contribution depends on your revenue.

Typically you contribute nothing if you have no revenue and you are still as much covered as the next rich guy.

That’s a huge difference. It means that you can see a doctor or have an ambulance transport you to the hospital for an expensive emergency surgery for 0€ whoever you are. And for the expensive drugs you need after that ? That’s still 0€ with no paperwork.

But to be fair, I’m exaggerating. You may have a 1€ franchise when you see the doctor.

In the United States in particular, though, you pay twice - once for the healthcare, a second time for all the bloat and waste that comes with it.

1/3 of US medical spending could be avoided by moving to an efficient single payer system.

But, a lost of ‘waste’ is diminishing returns where there’s some benefit to the procedures preformed. It’s easy to say paying 1 million for an extra week is a poor investment, until it’s you making that decision for a loved one.

Paying 1m/week is objectively a waste when you're refusing to pay 100k for a year, though. Healthcare is paid through insurance, so there's real meat to the loved one distinction - you're not actually making that decision for your loved ones in 99.9% of cases even in the US.

Yea, exactly.

You pay for healthcare in -any- system, even a completely communist/socialist system. Healthcare costs resources which much be allocated to a greater or lesser extent.

Problem with the US system is WHOM do you pay. Ultimately, to a degree perhaps greater than almost any other nation - you're paying quite a lot to stock holders, both public and private, stock holders of insurance, stock holders of pharma companies, stock holders of pharmacy companies, stock holders of EMR software (private company, Epic), and I'm sure, many other for-profit companies. Hospitals tend to be the only technically not for profits in the equation, as well as healthcare groups, but even then these groups tend to operate in a for-profit manner in service of ambitions of regional growth

Yep. And it's about 2% of my tax, which isn't noticable.

Unlike getting anything more serious than a cold in an idiotic, backward country without public health care.

US is an outlier by spending 17% of GDP on healthcare requiring high insurance costs by 9-12% is common in most developed countries requiring not 2% of your taxes by ~10% of your income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_spending_as_percent_of_...

Even in China you’re looking at 6% of income. Of course taxes aren’t evenly distributed, but 90k means enough income to be worth taxing without the political power to offload the tax burden on others.

Looking at that table you shared, it seems the US spends about 50% higher (17.2% vs 12.3% and less) than any other country on that list.

And it still has extreme problems for anyone with an illness more serious than (say) a cold.

You’re misunderstanding what the issues with US healthcare are.

I’ve had significant medical issues in the US and received truly excellent care without significant out of pocket costs, the same is true for many of my friends and family. There’s a reason there’s significant medical tourism to the US and from the US. However on population wide measures like life expectancy you’re better off providing basic care for 100% of the population than world class care for 40%.

There’s also major underlying issues like decades of obesity and ignorance around ‘alternative medicine’, vaccines, etc.