Doctors here in Europe are not really into diagnostic medicine. I'm going to compare with Dr. House from the TV series who with a team spent days on a single patient. This is not the reality, the reality is that your specialist doctor will spend 10 minutes thinking about your case before moving on to the next patient.

10 minutes is extremely charitable. Make it more like 2 minutes. (And we give the government over half our salary for this level of attention!)

> And we give the government over half our salary for this level of attention!

Well that's factually bullshit.

Both your statements are just plainly false (and I’m pretty sure you know it)

They are both correct.

Primary care physicians do not spend more than two minutes diagnosing you in my experience. The diagnosis is always shallow and sometimes wrong because of how rushed the process is.

You pay a third of your salary in taxes, then you pay VAT on everything you buy plus many more taxes for other things such as your property. It amounts to more than half the money you earn.

If I'm ever paying a third of my salary in taxes, I'm positively rolling in money. And, that's not how VAT works.

Yes, that’s how VAT works. You, the end consumer, pay it and the government pockets it.

The third sentence of the Wikipedia article begs to differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Value-added_tax&o...

> A value-added tax (VAT or goods and services tax (GST), general consumption tax (GCT)) is a consumption tax that is levied on the value added at each stage of a product's production and distribution. […] VAT is an indirect tax, because the consumer who ultimately bears the burden of the tax is not the entity that pays it.

(Even then, Wikipedia is oversimplifying: "ultimately bears the burden" isn't how economies work.)

What that means is that you don’t pay VAT directly to the government, the business collects it from you and is responsible for giving the money to the government. But yes, the burden is on the end consumer.

Au contraire, the burden is on the end consumer's employer, who pays the money to the consumer, who pays it to the business, who is responsible for giving the money to the government.

… And so on, and so forth. "The burden is on" is not how economies work. Personal property is owned, but money is merely controlled – and that control is subject to caveats, because money only has value as far as it can be exchanged for goods and services. Most forms of taxation (but especially VAT) are abstract accounting tricks to accomplish complex cybernetic effects, with no simple interpretation as a levy or tithe.

That’s the most convoluted way of explaining taxes I have ever seen. By that logic nobody pays any taxes. Of course neither economists nor the government feel that way about taxes (including VAT), which is the reason why foodstuffs have a lower VAT.

Most non-luxury foodstuffs have a lower (often zero) VAT for the same reason that certain organisations pay zero VAT, and income tax is progressive. It has a similar effect as a subsidy, although the psychological interpretation is different (and you can't discount human behaviour when modelling an economy).

Sounds like the american system only your employer takes it out of your check before you even see it

Keep in mind that even in the excellent documentary to which you refer, about Dr Hugh "House" Laurie, MD. PhD. McT., the premise is that his setup - a dedicated diagnostics team to focus on difficult to diagnose cases - is a rare concept, not something seen at most US hospitals. There wasn't, for example, a similar team in that other great documentary "Scrubs".

I'm pretty sure that's not the reality... anywhere. That's TV.