this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Murdered by Words
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Living in Belgium, I'm happy with the social security that's available here and the chances for a good education, etc. But I'm confused as to why this all isn't available for everyone in the USA. The USA is a world leader in so many domains so I would assume that this would benefit its inhabitants first.
Someone else has already said it's because of Capitalism, and to a point that's true. The other major reason is because of the economics of scale.
Belgium has a population of 11 million, the US has a population of 331 million.
Belgium has an area of 30,000 km^2, the State of Virginia alone has an area of 110,000 km^2. The metropolitan service area (basically the city and surrounding bedroom communities) of Washington DC is 14,000 km^2 or nearly half the size of all of Belgium.
In 2022 Belgium had ~196,000 immigrants while the US had ~45 million.
Coming back to the question; on Education the 2022 census said that 91.1% had at least finished Highschool and 48.4% had finished at least an Associates degree (or higher). https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html
On Social Security 69.8 million people received social security benefits in 2020 (retired, disabled, or other special circumstances).
On Healthcare the US is behind the times in comparison with much of the world, our healthcare is typically tied to employment (your job likely provides your health insurance). While this is the case our taxes are typically lower than most of the countries that are compared to the US, basically instead of paying taxes to get free healthcare we pay for healthcare directly. Even then people can still get access to the ACA (Obamacare), Medicare, or Medicaid. According to the 2022 census 92.1% of the US is insured, though I couldn't find a good statistic on what percentage are under insured (as in they have insurance but really need more). I did find some less than stellar statistics (so take these with a grain of salt) but on average Europeans spend 12.5% of their income on healthcare in the form of taxes while the median (yeah I know it's not the same as average but it was a different source) American spends 11.6% of their income on healthcare in the form of healthcare premiums and deductibles.
In summary the US generally does have pretty good living conditions for the vast majority of people. The problem is that if 10% of the population falls through the social welfare cracks in the US, that's 3x the population of Belgium.
EDIT: I wanted to quickly add, the US gets a lot of flak for being involved in foreign wars, politics, and spending too much on military spending. A lot of people think we should instead pull back that spending and instead fix things in the US. I agree with this sentiment, we do over spend on the military, but the US has also given more money to supporting Ukraine than the next 9 countries combined. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/27278/military-aid-to-ukraine-by-country/
Do you have a source for the claim Europeans spend more than people in the US per capita on healthcare?
Every source I've ever read the US has twice per capital spending and worse health outcomes in many areas.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/07/how-does-the-us-healthcare-system-compare-to-other-countries
I didn't say it was more? I said that a less than stellar source said that the average percentage of a European's income that goes to taxes for healthcare was roughly the same as the median percentage of an American's income.
Per Capita would be total expenditure divided by number of people. I'm saying (US) average healthcare costs/average income vs (Europe) amount of taxes for healthcare/average income.
I used this Quora page (https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-their-income-do-Europeans-for-various-countries-spend-on-the-cost-of-health-care-versus-Americans-Assume-average-cases-Which-is-a-better-deal) for the answers about European healthcare. It's not an ideal source, but it's kind of a pain to get the specific answer I'm asking for.
I used this source (https://www.statista.com/statistics/631987/percent-of-income-spent-on-health-plan-by-us-employees/) for a the Percentage of median income spent on premium contribution and deductibles in the US. Again, not a stellar source, but close enough to show it's not stupidly different for most people.
I made this post at 3 am on my phone, if you have feedback on these articles or better sources I'd be curious to see them.