Outcast wrote:
For most people working in the US at a decent job, their employes pay a very large proportion of their health care expenses. As a single person, IBM paid 100% of the medical insurance for me and I was fortunate enough to be pretty healthy, so my medical expenses while working, including things like dentistry were under 2% of my salary, overall (from ages 22 to 48).
But if you doing a comparison to Denmark then you need to include the cost of that health care as a “tax.”
Say I have 2 job offers, each of $100,000. Company A has a very good health plan that costs $15,000/employee while B has a bad plan that costs $5,000. Your cost to Company A is $115,000 and to B it is $105,000. Therefore Company A is really offering you $10,000 more. Or if you take the job at Company B it like a hidden $10,000 tax.
Let’s say the equivalent health care in Denmark is worth $15,000. That is supported by taxes. Because everyone gets it it has some elements of a UBI.
In Denmark that difference between Company A and B would be obvious. Company A would offer you $115,000 and B $105,000.
It’s just a shell game with the money.
Medicare-for-all is another form of UBI, a benefit equally spread among the CITIZENS.
I’m not arguing for or against at this point, simply trying to peel back the layers of obfuscation.
That 60% tax rate? We probably pay all of that here in the USA, it’s just that it comes in hidden taxes (medical) and out of pocket expenses.
Yet another way to think of the Socialist approach is that it is a very large uniform Insurance program. What we pay as individual expenses are covered by the government in a massive wealth redistribution system.