Matthew

Well, you guys are probably spending a lot less per capita. I'm spending 20k more per year than someone who makes my income in Canada. Would you be willing to see a tax increase of $20,000 per year to boost your healthcare services? (not that it would actually take anything close to that amount).

The comparison answers the question of what you get for healthcare via your taxes compared to what I pay for taxes coupled with an even higher burden paid annually to a health insurance corporation. I pay more to one health insurance corporation every year than I pay to my federal, state, and local taxes.

I've demonstrated that the for me personally the taxes and healthcare costs in Canada for someone who makes my income and lives in my size town are FAR FAR less than my actual taxes + monthly healthcare premiums in the US. $32K vs $53K. You're admitting that the tax burden is 45%, that would be $35k for my income. My Tax + Healthcare cost burden is 67% of my income. And I did include thousands of dollars in sales tax, not that you have $20k in sales tax that I accidentally missed. Obviously, if I took out the $24k in healthcare expenses out of the US side of the column, then Canada would be way more expensive. But this thread is about healthcare costs. Ultimately, what I get for healthcare services is roughly similar to what you get for healthcare, and I have to pay astronomically more for it.

The point of my little side quest exercise is to compare the total tax burden and healthcare costs for someone making my income in Canada vs the US. In the US working people pay medicare and social security to cover the people who are retired. I would have expected Canada to have much higher taxes, but it turns out that you guys are paying A LOT less after factoring in health insurance premiums.

Ok, let's do the math. SALES TAX: As calculated earlier, I'm making the equivalent of $108k CAD and paying $52k CAD. Sales tax in Ontario is a whopping 13%. Let's suppose I spend 2/3 of my remaining income in Ontario that year on things that qualify for the GST/HST. That's $36960 x 0.13 = $4805. Sales tax in my state are 6% (similar to much of Canada). So in my state that would be an equivalent of $2218 CAD. So that's a difference of $2587 CAD higher in Canada. FUEL TAX: In Ontario like in the US there is a gas tax. It's confusing af but best I can gather is that it's currently 14.3 cents per liter (CAD). The US has federal and state gas tax. In my state it totals to 30 cents per gallon (USD) equal to 7.9 cents per liter, which converts to 10.8 cent per liter in CAD. I drive about 20,000 miles per year and my car gets about 26mpg. So that's about 769 gallons (2911 liters) of gasoline. In Ontario I'd pay $416.27 CAD and in my US state I'd pay $314.39 CAD. Difference of $102 CAD higher in Canada PROPERTY TAXES: Keep in mind that in the US all public schools are primarily paid for via property taxes, while in Canada they are primarily paid for via provincial taxes. So I'm guessing my municipal taxes are a lot higher. I picked a nice town in Ontario that is pretty similar to my own, Barrie. My house is worth about $220,00 CAD. So I used the property tax calculator on the Barrie website, which came up with a total of $2977 in property tax. My property tax last year was $4103 CAD. Difference of $1126 CAD higher in the US Previously my tax comparison had my total Canadian taxes at $29,229 CAD and my total US state and federal taxes + health insurance cost at about $52,000 CAD. If we update this tally to reflect these fuel, property, and sales taxes estimates, then the total comes to $32,020 CAD in Canadian taxes vs $53126 CAD in American taxes + Health Insurance. I'll look at the rest of your post in a bit, that all took me a while to think about, but I did find it very interesting.

It's common for middle-tier family plan in the US. I get it through my employer. I'm rounding up, the actual monthly cost is slightly less than $1500.

Yup.

I absolutely agree. There is a lot of needless demonizing of opponents. It is also pretty easy to get people to just not care about the misfortune experienced by large segments of one's own society who they don't actually see. But 100% of the politically minded people I know IRL of either party are quick to care about actual problems of others who are right in front of them. I made about $73k US last year and paid about $14k in state and federal taxes (including Medicare and Social Security tax). Then i paid about $24k to health insurance per year ($18k out of my pocket and $6k contributed by employer as an employee benefit). So that's $38k in taxes and health insurance out of $79k in compensation. At my income level, if I lived in, say, Ontario, and we convert that $79k to your monopoly money (1:1.37), I would be making $108,000. According to the ontario income tax calculator on turbotax, my total Canadian taxes would be $29,229 ($16k federal, 8k provincial, 5k CPP/EI). By comparison, the taxes+health insurance I pay in the US is equal to $52k in canadian dollars. And a third of my health spending is just going to corporate shareholders and not to anyones healthcare. If i have a complaint I have to deal with corporate lawyers rather than dealing with a government service where I have clear rights as a citizen. As far as wait times, I guess I'd need to see how big of a problem that is in canada. I live in a place in the US that is considered to have really good health services available, but if I need to go to a specialist like an endocrinologist or dermatologist for any non-urgent reason, the wait is often like 3-6 months. But my mom is on chemo right now and there is big big money to be made with that, so they started that up for her within a few days of her cancer diagnosis.

A plausible case can be made for policies playing a role in stabilizing things so far. But the reality is complicated and global and no one really knows why the whole thing hasn't tanked. Economists will certainly be analyzing and theorizing about this for the next century. Maybe we're in our own oblivious roaring 20s while lower down financing strains are building. I agree, and the doom and gloom rhetoric on the right is transparently self-serving. This is a great point. I lost a lot of value in my own savings but my home price has nearly doubled (no mortgage). Of course if i ever sell this place I'll probably then get taxed for all the inflation-based increase in value. For that matter a lot of the inflation is probably psychological. Econ 101: a shift in the demand curve can be caused by the mere expectation of future price increases. And if your customers are primed to a widespread spike in prices the suppliers take advantage of that.

Yeah, basically. They did dozens of theatrical repeals of the ACA in the house under Obama. They ran on overturning it as like their #2 main issue. And then poof, not an issue anymore at all. But the basic problem of healthcare costs hasn't gone away for Anerican voters. Certainly some republican somewhere still wants to try to address it. For real. Though even if trump had played nice I'm not sure mccain would have actually supported its repeal without anything to replace it with.

@Hodad It's true that the economy has hummed among suprisingly well for the last 4 years considering everyone was predicting a big post- pandemic recession. I don't think anyone can take credit for causing the period of post-pandemic inflation nor preventing a recession. But I guess Biden can at least say he didn't do anything to create sudden shocks or added uncertainty to the system. But going through a period of inflation was traumatic for a lot people and they are still feeling the impact of it, so I don't see the point in dismissing it as an issue. Maybe hourly wage labor has kept up, but lot of people on a salary schedule have essentially lost 25% of their income. People with money in savings saw the value of that evaporate dramatically for a while. And the CPI does not include finance costs. The cost of borrowing is still very high. The housing shortage and the huge increase in home prices has caused a lot of people to be locked into a lower tier of housing than what they had been planning a decade ago.

Get a load of this guy. 😆

Yeah exactly. As a voter Id be inserted to at least know who's in the potential bullpen of economic experts on each side.

Yeah plus the tuned-out rejects who after this many years still have no opinion about f*cking Donald trump aren't going to now finally be won over to either side by detailed economic policy.

For what it's worth, I'm not hearing the Democrats or the Republicans say or propose anything useful about the economy. They are both pandering to dumb ideas that their bases want to hear, and they are both being deceptive about the economic ups and downs of the last 4 years. Republicans can't get honest about post-covid inflation, and democrats can't get honest about the post-covid recovery.

Oof! In fairness to my insurance overlords, birthing expenses on my plan are their own sepatate category and i did not have to do the massive $5k deductible. I probably paid a couple hundred in misc expenses and the quality of the services we received were top notch. To be clear, i pay $1500 per month directly out of my paycheck. Insurance companies sell group negotiated discount deals to employers and the government makes it so you can pay for your insurance on a pre-tax basis. Each region of the US have different insurance companies that dominate and have their own negotiated pricing agreements with healthcare provders in that region. So via my insurance im allowed to use doctors within a certain network, but not some competing. It's basically like high tech feudalism. 😄

Quite right. The democrats could have done a more bold system back in 2010. But even the milquetoast conservative program they did implement was thrashed as being hardcore Stalinism. Or if you mean republicans taking care of it in 2016, its true they could have. But it turns out since Dems enacted the republicans own healthcare idea, they didn't really have anywhere to retreat and a full repeal was not popular.

I wouldn't take it that far. Actual ordinary republicans in real life are nice people. Their range of opinions consist of thoughts about the transgenders, presidential horse race, abortion, and whatever else they learn that they are supposed to have an opinion on that week (which conveniently never includes criticizing the system of health insurance companies controlling their medical decisions). They kind of just assume that their party must have some very reasonable plan for healthcare. The insurance companies on the other hand definitely want you to die if you're very sick, and have a long history of denying coverage to people as a matter routine business practice.

That's true, and maybe in the case in question other courts on appeal might rule that the original court order violated the man's freedom of speech. Its certainly a grey area situation. Conservatives aren't wrong to have their guard up about free speech. Everyone should all the time. But we also need to be on guard against unreasonable propaganda and manipulation. When people are being whipped up into a frenzy about alleged free speech violations, you still have to examine the soecifics to see if it's exactly the way they are portraying it. Not true. I'm not beholden to any dogma or political movement. I'm cautiously far-left in many of my views but have no problem critiquing my own side or supporting principled conservative/libertarian/nationalist positions that I agree with.

Healthcare is in the top 3 of concerns for Americans. For you Canadians, here's how it works in the US. Through my employer I pay about $1500 per month to an insurance corporation for a mediocre family health insurance plan. In the event that i need some kind of medical treatment, I must pay about $5000 out of my own pocket before the insurance pays anything. It doesnt cover dental or many eye expenses. Increase in these insurance costs has been steady and linear for many decades. To try to address this, in 2010 democrats passed the ACA, which required everyone to buy insurance, created a subsidized insurance marketplace for lower income people, and made many very popular restrictions on what insurance corporations can no longer do to their insurance customers. Meanwhile, since the 1960s through Medicare, older Americans (who are mostly republican, by the way) can just go to the doctor and the government pays for most of it. This is the model that most democrats would like to see expanded for everyone. In 2010 democratic party leaders went with an existing republican market-based plan in a doomed hope of getting some of them on board with the legislation. Since 2010, the ACA is widely appreciated for what it does do, but it has shortcomings. Republicans have long vowed to end the ACA. When they controlled the entire congress and the presidency from 2016-2018 they had an easy pathway for doing anything they want to do to change or improve healthcare, but did not do so. They attempted a straight repeal of the ACA, it failed, and that was it. Today, the republican platform has just this minimal and vague 3-sentence statement on the subject of healthcare: Is it now safe to say that Republicans have no major ambitions for trying to do anything with Healthcare?

This subforum is about federal policies in the US.

Thousands of people across US during the 2020 race protests were arrested.

Courts are granted by law limited procedural power that includes temporarily jailing people for not cooperating with juducial procedeedings. Heres how contempt of court works in the US, I'm sure it's similar up your way Indeed, as I am witnessing. Agreed, exactly the rationale you used: IF I consider the context of why the people were actually prosecuted THEN I "might as well try to justfy rape." I will help respond to such attacks if I am shown a real example of this. I did somewhat agree with a couple things in your original list, but overall your claim so far seems very exaggerated. Fair point, I like a more big picture historical view. Though pre-christian greco-roman culture was almost completely different had its own ideas about sexuality compared to the more christianized germanic-based european culture than developed later on. There was never a social and political stuggle to gain normalization and acceptance of gay sex in ancient Greece or rome.

Anyone calling for violence should not expect any free speech protections for doing so. The present issue is whether people are being prosecuted for simply having certain opinions or exercising free speech.