Sure, yes, that's a bigger non-tax expense for individuals in the US. The US having by far the least efficient healthcare system in the world is a huge problem.
> See the overall ‘Taxes as a % of GDP’ comparisons.
Yes, I’ve updated my post to address your wildly inaccurate “Taxes as a % of GDP” comparison, using the most recently published OECD data which shows that you were close for the US, and way low for the UK.
At the end of the day, Americans still pay, and pay more. 26% in taxes, and then another ~11% in non-government-covered (non-Medicare/Medicaid) healthcare spending.
They pay less in taxes, by a wide margin.
They also get less for them, by a wide margin, particularly (but not exclusively) in healthcare.
I do, however, posit that when it comes to determining whether an economy/society/??? is healthy (which is the conversation in this sub-thread), we need to look at all of these 'costs of life/business'. So, yes, the sticker price on the UK looks rough, but add it all up... And it comes out to be pretty similar. As it turns out, providing similar forms of services costs... About the same, across the developed world.
Months to years for an appointment, incompetent doctors and a bureaucracy that puts Kafka to shame.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/04/30/the-nhs-is-in-s...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/02/collapse-nhs-tra...
Yes US healthcare has issues but it's nowhere near as bad as UK.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
combined with ever increasing inequality offers a much better explanation. Inequality is high in the US too but at least they have a lot of growth which means that the bottom 80% or so are at least not getting poorer.
A very significant proportion of US population is covered by Medicaid and if more if you add Medicare. In fact the US government spends almost 50% more on healthcare than Britain does (and that’s only public spending..). The problem is that the system is simply extremely inefficient.
Just look at Switzerland healthcare is privatized to a much higher degree than in the US yet still more accessible…
But it isn't always the case. Where we live the NHS is excellent, appointments are fine, doctors are competent, and we've had no issues with bureaucracy. There is literally nothing I'd complain about, and we have double-digit interactions with the NHS each year.
The only fly in the ointment is the recent nurse strike happened on a day the wife was scheduled for some surgery, so that was cancelled. But I support them in that, and the rescheduled date is less than a month later.
There are issues everywhere, but there's no way I'd swap any of it for the US version. And always bear in mind that negative talk sells more papers/gets more eyeballs than positive.
Very few people in the US have top of the line healthcare (hence, why its “top of the line” and not “typical”), and if you do it costs a lot per covered person, even if it is less visible because instead of a salary deduction instead a large chunk of money that the company is willing to pay for your labor just goes straight to an insurer without being part of your nominal pay.
(I, too, as I suspect is fairly common for HN readers given the demographic tendencies, have excellent healthcare in the US, abd most of the cost isn’t a salary deeuction, but the cost is nontrivial.)
> NHS in the UK is collapsing, but even if it didn't, qualitatively it's orders of magnitude worse than what one would receive in the US through one's employer:
Over 1/5th of US workers (not residents, people actually employed) aren’t eligible for any employer health insurance, and for many of the rest it is quite bad, with very high out of pocket costs if you actually need any non-preventice care. NHS may be worse than what you or I have through our employers, but “top of the line” isn’t the usual experience.
> Yes US healthcare has issues but it's nowhere near as bad as UK.
...if you are part of the relatively narrow elite in the US with top of the line coverage, and for that the US pays more than a time and a half what the UK does as a share of GDP, and more than double what the UK does per capita...while leaving over 12% of adults and 5% of children uninsured.
Luckily, Labour will win the next GE, so they can start to turn this around.
The UK has had the worst pandemic recovery almost anywhere in the developed world. How many other countries have an annual "Winter Crisis" in their healthcare that's extending into autumn and summer?
The Tories have been in power since 2010. They're the common factor in the many issues the UK is currently facing.
And, again, the giant bugbear that is health insurance rears its ugly head on the US side. See the overall 'Taxes as a % of GDP' comparisons.
Edit: I stand corrected about taxes as % of GDP. You are right, that the UK is at 33.5%. [1] Unfortunately, again, that doesn't include the percentage of US spending on healthcare - which is 17.8% of its GDP, with much of it coming out of after-tax dollars, instead of pre-tax ones. (Medicaid and Medicare make up about a third of that - and are, obviously, financed by taxes.)
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-kingdom.p...