OT: Jibjab, Politics, the Big Bang and more!

[Arryn]

Originally posted by vigabrand:
Here is a more accurate picture.
http://www.oecd.org/document/51/0,23..._1_1_1,00.html

I was pretty close, with Germany in the 50% of household income for a single worker.

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics." Not that the numbers either of you are citing are wrong. Per se. The problem is that statistics are subject to interpretation, and interpretation is often wrong. None of these numbers are truly meaningful because they fail to measure what is the crux of the issue being debated: cost vs. benefit. On average, workers in EU countries pay a higher % of income in taxes than those in the U.S. But do they get value for their extra expenditure? None of you have answered that question. Until you can, comparisons between the U.S. and elsewhere are meaningless. Does the U.S. have better healthcare? Depends on who you ask. Millionaire celebrities get better care than night shift janitorial workers. But this is true most everywhere in the world, not just the U.S. There are U.S. laws already in place that mandate that no one is turned away from hospitals, regardless of ability to pay. Whether they get the same level of service is a seperate argument. The proper question to ask is: whose citizen's pay more, per capita, for healthcare (after factoring taxes, out-of-pocket costs, etc.)? Once you have a table of how much each country's citizens pay, only then can you compare the quality of care between nations.