[quote=livinincali][quote=no_such_reality]There’s several reasons.
First thing we need to address is that per capita, the USA across it’s levels of Government is currently and has for the last five years been spending on par with GReat Britain, France and Germany. We haven’t taxed to that level, but per person, we’re spending the same level of Government.
Except we don’t have universal health care, SS is kind of like their pensions, but overall, we’ve been funneling our money into the Military.
When you look at Norway, firstly, their top tax rate is 48%, their GDP per capita is twice ours, with a GDP at basically $100K/person.[/quote]
We have universal health care for 119 million people in this country (medicare and medicaid) at a cost of $940/119 = $7,899 per person on the program. Most industrialized nations provide health care for about $3,500-5,550 per capita. http://kff.org/global-indicator/health-expenditure-per-capita/
The real big problem is the total cost of providing medical care is this country. The key is figuring out how to provide medical care for less not figuring out how to get more people to help pay for the exorbitant costs.[/quote]
That’s because Medicare and Medicaid are covering our **most expensive** patients in the U.S., while other developed nations cover the sick AND the healthy (less expensive) patients.
What so many “anti-socialists” seem to miss is that we already cover the most expensive patients with publicly-funded healthcare programs (the elderly, pregnant women, infants/children, and the indigent all tend to be the most expensive patients). Taxpayers are subsidizing the healthcare industry by covering most of the expensive patients (these subsidies for the private market absolutely dwarf the problems related to the “pension crisis,” but you’ll never hear about it because the capitalist elites benefit from it).
We’ve socialized the losses by shunting the expensive patients to Medicare, Medicaid, and other publicly-funded programs; and privatized the profits by leaving the most profitable/healthy patients for the private market…as we usually do in our “capitalist” system.
