1y ago

America is so great we privatized taxes

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Well, here in Germany you're paying (you have to) around 15% of your gross income for health insurance plus 3.4% for intensive care insurance. Your employer pays for half of those. Insurances are expensive but if you need them it's cheaper than paying for treatment yourself. What I pearsonally find worse is the public tv and radio fee you have to pay each month (18 euros, same as netflix premium) to finance some dickwad director earning 200k+ even if you don't watch or even have a tv/radio. Also it doesn't matter how much you earn, the fee is the same.
- So workers pay 7.3% and employers pay 7.3%? It covers all of your health care costs? U.S. insurance varies in cost but we have medical bills on top of insurance costs.
  
  But what does your insurance pay for if not the medical bills? It's supposed to be its entire purpose, pay the medical bills.
  
  Insurance companies put enormous amounts of resources, time, and manpower into avoiding paying the bills. They’ll find some excuse buried in their 400 page packet, or they’ll deem something not a “medical necessity “ until it’s too late to do anything about it.
  
  I received a HEART TRANSPLANT and my insurance tried to kick back one of my echo-cardiograms that I get quarterly to make sure my donor heart isn't being rejected. They're ridiculous.
  
  There's different tiers, but in the case of a doctor visit and prescriptions for medication, you typically have a copay amount which insurance does not cover. If you have a serious illness and require treatment in the hospital you would be required to pay 30%-40% of the total bill. Also some insurance requires that you pay a certain amount per year before it will take effect, then the insurance pays the rest for the year. There's tons of different plans and scenarios, insurance here is a rip off.
  
  Exactly! It's ridiculous. My father is disabled and on a fixed income. He has insurance but his treatment still costs him thousands a year, even though he only receives a few thousand to live on.
  
  Yep, all covered except for some extra stuff like getting your teeth deep-cleaned by your dentist or some premium dental prosthetics, but they usually subsidize it. Edit: also having most people enrolled in the public insurance (wealthier people have private insurance) makes this system possible, at least for now.
- The public broadcasting fees are important to prevent private monopolies. To add some context to non germans: The most people here who cry about the fee are far right wingers because the public channels are the only ones really doing work to uncover things like Nazis in the police.
  And if you are without a job you dont have to pay it.
- I find it interesting that u mention the German public broadcasting fee in a post about healthinsurance fees. Anyway I see the point why some criticise this specific fee. Imo the fact that is actually a separate "fee" and not hidden behind general state funding as taxes is the problem why people even mention it. Obviously when we would talk about taxes you will see there are much more fucked up ways where your tax is wasted. Anyway most of Europe does indeed have public broadcasting that is funded by public money. That is because they are indeed supposed to serve the public. In the EU, they are organized in the Eu Broadcasring Union. There is are very lengthy wiki articles on the history on PB or the EBU. However the gist of why this is such a vital concept could maybe summarized as " EBU members are public service media (PSM) broadcasters whose output is made, financed, and controlled by the public, for the public. PSM broadcasters are often established by law but are non-partisan, independent and run for the benefit of society as a whole."

20 comments