Finnish public healthcare encompasses things like regular dental visits that people of every age use.
Also, those high taxes pay for world-class public libraries and child daycare which the broad public use, even expats in the IT sectors.
So they would only justify perhaps about 0.1% higher taxes?
Or, you just self-insure for dental, if you make a reasonable amount of money or have some savings.
(It's much more feasible for dental where the realistic maximum amounts are still quite small, compared to cancer treatment or similar.)
Consider tax paid healthcare to be a public insurance plan that doesn't need to skim billion dollar profits from their "customers" then.
In general, I'd prefer services with competition and that you can opt out of.
Having said that, Singapore's system works fairly well in practice. But it's not at all like eg the NHS.
We were talking about costs. In the US, calling an ambulance is not guaranteed to be free.
OP claimed that as a young, healthy expat, you don't benefit from a system where your tax payments finance health care.
I showed examples where a young, healthy expat directy benefits from this system, by having medical emergencies that would potentially bankrupt you in the US.
Not sure I followed your point here.
Not really. You pay income taxes in general, and some portion of that funds the public healthcare system, but healthcare isn’t something you ever have to think about in particular.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
Yes, but it's one I hope I'll one day no longer be able to use.
> The literacy rate is 99%
So, there's a decent chance you Googled "US literacy rate" and copy-pasted it from there. I would recommend clicking the actual article and reading through it, because Google's quote is... not exactly representative of what's contained within.
If you didn't do that, you're probably citing this from the World Factbook, who use a definition of literacy broadly encapsulated by "is capable of reading". By that definition, if you can look at some words and then say them out loud, you're literate. Useful for developing countries or historical contexts, but not exactly meaningful in a modern society with many resources.
These days most literacy studies look at actually understanding content, and being able to reason about it. This typically includes some level of numerical literacy (not necessarily mathematics, but e.g., being able to understand the difference between a million and a billion), as well as things identifying internally contradictory statements. By those standards, the United States does abysmally.
It's worth noting here that the U.S. does disproportionately suffer in some studies that look specifically at literacy in a small number of official languages (English for the U.S., occasionally also including Spanish), rather than counting literacy in any language as sufficient. My comments here are in regards to the latter.
> and a higher % of the population has a tertiary education than finland
The people who choose to go to tertiary education in the United States (or indeed any other country) are not usually the people in desperate need of better education. The problem is predominantly in insufficient primary and secondary schooling, combined with a cultural attitude of anti-intellectualism that leads to many people thinking they never need to learn a thing once they exit the school system.
Not a uniquely American phenomenon (Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" quote being a particularly flagrant European example), but one that's uncomfortably persistent there. For example, it takes a very unintelligent person to be in the middle of a global pandemic, yet think that the opinion of a reality TV host is more important than the professional advice of a doctor. Those people exist everywhere, but they exist in astonishing concentrations in the United States.
> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
My point is that, as someone who lives in neither North America or Europe, if I had to pick a random adult citizen from the population of either the United States or Finland to make a rational decision for me, I'm picking Finland.
It could have been phrased in a much more engaging tone rather than an attempt to "score points".
Speak for yourself: I've never paid a penny for healthcare in the UK, besides an effective tax rate lower than I now pay in the US and the occasional prescription charge where an OTC version of the relevant medicine was not available at lower cost.
Ok, for a (male or lesbian, since you specify 'wife') Bay Area SWE, you're right. But do look at that election map and notice the scores of people living in the rest of the US, in large part voting against their own health-care interests but still. In Missouri the median income is around $55k. Putting $12k of that into health insurance (not health care, but insurance) is pretty hefty.
For such a middle class person Europe is likely to be better / more stable economically. Single software engineer will surely have it financially much better in the US though.
[0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Robber...
The US has universal Medical coverage for the elderly.
