I live in the US, and while the American system might not be "OMG!!! EVUL!!!" per se, it's by absolutely no means a good system. The US pays significantly more for health care than any other country in the world, it's not even close (it's about 50% more than even the second-place country). I do not mean out of pocket, I'm talking about total cost, whoever pays for it. In fact, the US has more per capita PUBLIC expenditure than even rich countries like Sweden and Finland (and about the same as Belgium) pay for health care in total, private and public. There are only a few countries where even the amounts the public puts up are higher than the US. So health care is obviously not the reason for the lower taxes of the US vs Scandinavia (other public spending makes far more difference). But despite spending astronomical sums on health care, the US lags behind much the rest of the industrialized world in virtually every quantifiable measure of health. In fact, even "developing countries" like Cuba are doing just as well on many of them (on life expectancy, US and Cuba are tied, for example). Go us?
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I live in the US, and while the American system might not be "OMG!!! EVUL!!!" per se, it's by absolutely no means a good system. The US pays significantly more for health care than any other country in the world, it's not even close (it's about 50% more than even the second-place country). I do not mean out of pocket, I'm talking about total cost, whoever pays for it. In fact, the US has more per capita PUBLIC expenditure than even rich countries like Sweden and Finland (and about the same as Belgium) pay for health care in total, private and public. There are only a few countries where even the amounts the public puts up are higher than the US. So health care is obviously not the reason for the lower taxes of the US vs Scandinavia (other public spending makes far more difference). But despite spending astronomical sums on health care, the US lags behind much the rest of the industrialized world in virtually every quantifiable measure of health. In fact, even "developing countries" like Cuba are doing just as well on many of them (on life expectancy, US and Cuba are tied, for example). Go us?