Do you support universal healthcare?

 

(no labor and delivery is not free, labour and delivery is )

 

Everything has to be paid for by someone. In the UK public healthcare is funded by obligatory National Insurance Contributions on all wage earners (including those with private healthcare schemes) - while it is used to partially fund the NHS, contributions are also used to fund payments such as maternity leave etc. The UK system is far from perfect, but it is further from imperfect.

 

It is "free" in the sense that you don't get presented with an invoice at the end of treatment that you have to claim back from your insurance company, or pay out of your chequing account - as far as the end-user is concerned treatment costs nothing, whether it is for an ingrown toenail or a quadruple heart bypass, and it is "free" to all, whether your NIC stamp is paid up or not.

 

We also have a private system that sits on top of the public one, so people can augment their cover with private health insurance, but at the end of the day, anything serious will be treated in an NHS hospital with after-care being private.

 

The one area of healthcare where we don't have universal free cover is dental - so cue all the English bad-teeth jokes...

 

No one likes change and they will resist it at all costs. No one likes paying taxes, especially stealth taxes. Everyone hates bureaucracy. No one wants to get sick, everyone wants to be cured.

 

The UK has had a NHS and NIC for over 60 years - no one working in the UK today knows anything different, NIC has always been deducted from their pay-packets. The problem is that everyone sees it as a deduction, whereas the reality is, that like income-tax, it was never their money on the first place. The problem is the mindset that regards Gross pay as theirs', and any deductions as being money they cannot spend on themselves. I've made this point a couple of times in various threads (including this one) and no one seems to see it the way I do...

 

 

 

rpe9p wrote: Dean wrote: . Also, a $1,000,000 paycheck is structured to account for a higher tax-rate - if the base-rate was always 10% then that salary would never have risen above $700K in the first place. Also it doesnt make any sense that businesses would pay more to their employees to compensate for higher tax rates.  If all of a sudden the government increased taxes on everyone by 10%, businesses wouldnt suddenly have an extra 10% to pay out to all their employees, they would continue to pay the same amount.  What would make a business want to pay someone more just because more of the money is going to the government instead of their worker?  If anything it would discourage them from raising wages.

That isn't what I was saying - companies do not compensate for across-the-board increases in taxation, but they do compensate when an employee moves into a higher tax bracket, even if they do not do it deliberately they will offer a pay rise that results in a commensurate (or at least "attractive") increase in Net pay. The differentials between low-earners on lower tax-rates and high-earners on higher tax-rates are not proportional and never have been.

 

 

There is some truth to be learned from this point. HIV treatments can be expensive but some are not. Treating infected mothers to prevent transmission can be done for much less money than you'd think. Little in US dollars, still terribly expensive in the money of the third world countries it devastates.

 

The health care debate in America pales next to the atrocity that is world poverty.

 

(Runs and hides)