In the US, the average out-of-pocket healthcare spending was $1,424.6 per capita in 2022
Most people have insurance. They might have some high out of pocket maximum like $10k. So worse case scenario you're out an additional $10k.
But you pay a lot less in taxes
In US, a single filer, the 12% bracket covers income from $11,926 to $48,475. In UK it's 20%
So at 40k you're paying an additional 3k in taxes, not to mention VAT and others (although I am ignoring other US taxes like state, local and payroll). More than covers your out of pocket healthcare costs.
And pretty much any job in the US is significantly higher paying, for instance a typical accountant in US makes 80k while in the uk that 37k pounds. Pretty much every office job is like this. And note the US 80k figures includes benefits like ... you guessed it, healthcare!
Even if make the generous assumptions that taxes are the same, UK has same healthcare quality and everyone is hitting out of pocket max every year, it's still not close. The whole "but we don't have to pay for healthcare" strikes me as just a cope.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/484578/us-per-capita-out...
Your calculations don't take into account personal allowance, which is £12750($15680) in the UK.
At $40k the difference is much closer to $1.5k.
Also there's the question of costs of living. That same 40k buys you 30% more in the UK if you're including rent.
Even without out of pocket costs there's lots of reasons to be angry at insurers.
Eventually 100% of the population will need healthcare of some type.
And without maximums to plan and set prices against, wouldn’t it just be a wealth transfer scheme from the relatively young and healthy to the particularly old and sick…? (With those in the middle roughly neutral)
At least I can’t see any credible way to insure against something 100% of all possible customers will need.
You're right, it doesn't make literal sense. Though we use the term, health insurance, everybody is really talking about medical coverage, period, except for those trying to play semantic games (not pointing to you). Concepts like risk pooling can still be useful, but at the end of the day we're not really talking about insurance, but how to equitably spread the costs and benefits of rapidly advancing medicine.
Social Security is closer to an insurance scheme. Social Security is a deferred life annuity (a type of insurance instrument) that everybody is required to buy, except there's no middleman. Unfortunately, the last time we extended the deferral period to properly account for risk and cost was 1983. When Social Security originally passed it was assumed Congress would regularly change retirement ages; people in the 1930s knew how insurance worked, and knew full well that lifespans would continue increasing, but they failed to account for political friction in having to explicitly update the terms of the program. Other than military pensions, we didn't have much political experience with large entitlement programs (though it's possible the reason they didn't build in an inflation mechanism then is the same we can't do it today).
Medicare was patterned after Social Security, however like SS we don't properly adjust the age nor pay-in as lifespans have increased and medical costs soared; and advances in medicine and expectations of care evolve so quickly these days that I'm not sure its even possible as a practical matter, not while pretending it's truly any kind of insurance.
Health insurance is in many ways not even insurance, it's in many ways a price negotiation mechanism.
Anyway the whole system is overly complex, based off a tax credit from the 1950s, but the transition to a new scheme is nearly impossible while one political party is dead set against any improvement, especially if it might be perceived as a positive for the other political party, and also they have become so hyper partisan that they are not allowed to work with the other party in a bipartisan manner.
In that case, the upstream sources of why Americans accept this huge charade is going to keep on messing with even the best laid plans.
For Americans overall, 71% rate the quality of healthcare they personally receive as excellent or good. Similarly, 72% give excellent or good marks to the quality of care they receive personally.
Regarding health insurance coverage, 65% of Americans rate their own coverage as excellent or good. Another poll found 63% rated their own health care coverage as excellent or good.
You have to get offline
https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-poll-strong-majority-...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/654044/view-healthcare-quality-...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/468176/americans-sour-healthcar...
Perhaps. But if I weren’t online I wouldn’t know how widespread the support of Luigi is.
Only 75% of people on employer healthcare plans are satisfied? A great many people aren’t on employer plans.
From the third link you provided:
For the first time in Gallup’s two-decade trend, less than half of Americans are complimentary about the quality of U.S. healthcare, with 48% rating it “excellent” or “good.” The slight majority now rate healthcare quality as subpar, including 31% saying it is “only fair” and 21% -- a new high -- calling it “poor.”
> A smaller but significant share of adults, 12%, said they were supportive of the decision to murder Brian Thompson, 50, who was shot in New York on Dec. 4.
12% is basically zero in this country. To give you a frame of reference, 14% of people think Obama is antichrist
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/1-in-4-americans-sympathiz...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/12-million-americans-believe-liza...
12% is not basically zero.
https://www.thewrap.com/luigi-mangione-discourse-alarms-home...
I think there's great dissatisfaction with healthcare in general, but social media is not a good way of judging social attitudes across the US. It's great for finding a small niche, however.
Just a whole swathe of anxiety and stress that doesn't exist anymore. I'm not sure I can put a price on how valuable that is for our family. I clearly priced it higher than the higher income and lower tax I'd be paying if I'd stayed in the Bay Area though.
[0] https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2024-section-1-cost-...