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The US consistently scores among the best countries in the world for paying people [0]. Is there some way I can lodge an application to be exploited in a similar manner, without having to move there? Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.
They're inventing a metric there that just doesn't matter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.
The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of household size. That has some unreasonable consequences. For example, if housing is unaffordable, children live longer with their parents, and measured income is higher.
The second metric measures either net income or consumption, depending on the country and the year. It takes taxes, benefits, and purchasing power into account but fails to consider savings and subsidized services.
To me, it would mean a significant reduction in quality of live and I am low-key scared of all the ingredients and additives in food that are pretty much banned everywhere else. Not to mention all risks regarding healthcare.
When everything is dangerous, nothing is dangerous.
Have you read the health warning in detail and disagree from an informed point of view or are you just generally opposed to regulation?
https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list
You can also search for studies that compare the societal cost/benefit of using a car vs a bicycle. The generally accepted conclusion is that cars have a cost while cycling has a benefit for society.
if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems.
in the U.K for example - I used private healthcare, could've I have to the NHS - yeah but it means waiting times.
the southern states in the US are also what bring the quality of life down.
I am mostly comparing these places to all first world countries, rather than just the anglosphere.
It definitely didn't start with Trump, it just became policy under him.
Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice, and if the rural white populace weren't already afraid losing the cultural power of their demographic majority and identity. People forget how much of a joke candidate he was until racists took him seriously.
>if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare
If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.
I don't think so, judging by the many heads of state and other filthy rich people choosing to get healthcare in the West instead of their local countries.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
Also, my father-in-law went from consultation to a full knee replacement surgery within 3 weeks. Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your job, you will think twice to go on strike, unionize, or freely express your thought, especially when combined with at-will employment.
Secondly, I would also debate the better health care. I recently had two health scares in my direct family (one time cancer, one time another tumor) and in both cases care was quick and excellent. Of course, there is quite a lot of variance between countries. We lived in Germany for a while and I was less impressed by health care there (though it's probably still much better and definitely cheaper than the average health care in the US).
Again, that kind of thing takes 8 months or a year minimum anywhere in Europe or Canada.
Sorry, this is totally false. I checked the local established norm (49 days) and stats (generally between 30 and 150 days, depending on the hospital, which you can choose). And this doesn't depend on private insurance, because it does not exist in the county I live.
I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.
I am able to see my general practitioner generally the same or next day and waiting time at the GP is typically less than 10 minutes. I can also visit my dentist the same day in the case of an emergency.
It's the same in many other European countries. I got kidney stones when we were on vacation in Denmark (I don't recommend). I visited a doctor twice, both times I called and I could immediately come to their practice and they ran tests, etc. I don't think we even got a bill for either visits. I only paid something like 10 euros at the pharmacist for a good stock of painkillers.
As an American who's had to deal with the ramifications of employer-based health insurance first-hand, I can confirm that this strikes me as accurate. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where even being out of work for most of last year did not hurt my financial situation very much (my wife and I were actually able to buy our house during my unemployment), but even being in that fairly privileged position, due to her autoimmune condition, we've had to go through quite a lot of annoying bullshit from a lack of healthcare options due to basically being stuck with whatever my employer happens to offer.
With my previous health insurance (from a startup where there were around 10 employees during my time there), we were able to get the semiannual procedure she's been getting for years from her specialist doctor approved relatively quickly, but with the insurance from my current job, it took months earlier this year to get it approved because they kept denying it due to her condition (which is pretty rare in general, and even more rare for anyone to have it as long as she has; one of the first doctors she saw for it years ago told us "you're not going to find a support group for this online", and we've literally yet to find anything online about anyone else ever having it for as long as she has) not being on the list of pre-approved conditions. This was typical across several insurance companies for the initial request, but with this insurance company, they put us through an extremely convoluted process for appealing. First, they told her doctor that he couldn't email or fax them his letter of medical necessity and had to send it through snail mail, which even a month later they claimed they had never received. They told me I could email it to them, which I did, only for them to later claim I didn't have authorization to do that on behalf of my wife (something that never came up in the call where they told me to email it to them despite us both being there on speaker phone), and she had to fill out and email them a form authorizing me. She did that, but then after a while they still just sent us a blanket rejection for it not being on the initial list (as if there were any chance of it magically appearing on the list between when they initially denied it and when they finally processed the appeal?), and they could not provide us with any evidence that an actual doctor looked at the letter where her doctor stated definitively that he would expect her to likely experience permanent and potentially fatal organ damage with the treatment due to none of the other options having mitigated her symptoms in the past. After filing a grievance, they insisted that if her doctor filled out the information in a separate form that they had never mentioned to either him or us before, they would take it into account, so he did that, and then after a while they still rejected it with identical language to before. Finally after three months, they gave us the ability to have her doctor talk directly to an actual doctor on their end, and then it got approved within the next week. No one was able to provide any sort of coherent explanation as to why they kept putting us through such bullshit procedures that had no effect instead of letting us just do that in the first place.
I don't pretend to have any first-hand experience with healthcare in other countries, but no sane system would end up with such disparate outcomes for the exact same condition for the exact same patient due to literally nothing but how much bullshit the insurance company feels like putting you though. There's literally no way for us to have stayed with the insurance company that managed to actually read the information her doctor sent them and approve it within a few days the first time because they're based in a different state that the company I was employed by happened to be based in, and my current employer has no other insurance companies as options for me to pick instead. Even without all of the potential awful things that you mention people might go through with a subpar employer, the situation actually still sucks even when you do like your employer because your insurance options are tied to them. I like my job, and other than the insurance company sucking, it works well for me, but I also can't reasonably expect them to pick up an entire new insurance option for the entire company because of the bullshit I went through, so as much as I'd love to literally never have to deal with this specific insurance company again, there's no way to do that without giving up the job as well. Realistically, that would end up causing a lot more stress and uncertainty that my wife and I don't want to go through (especially when there's no guarantee that whatever insurance we'd end up with from a new job would be any better). At least in another country, we'd have some level of consistency in trying to get her treatment approved.
It absolutely is.
America is great if you make at least 150k a year and never get sick.
The moment you get sick with anything serious your employer might fire you. Labor protections in America are a bad joke. Your boss wants to fire you because your taking time off to look after a sick relative, I guess you can sue, but they’ll blame something and probably win.
Your boss lies to your face about pay and benefits, ohh well sucks to suck.
Very minor illnesses turn catastrophic. Several stories have emerged of otherwise healthy young people going without insulin and not doing so well…
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shane-patrick-boyle-died-a...
Even if you have insurance, ohh well…
> Parents sue over son's asthma death days after inhaler price soared without warning Cole Schmidtknecht, 22, had insurance but couldn’t afford to refill his asthma inhaler after the cost jumped from $70 to more than $500.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/asthma-death-pres...
Half the country cheers this on. The idea of some ‘lazy’ person getting something they don’t deserve rationalizes this dystopian system.
Of course the American system ends up costing significantly more for worse outcomes.
Access to therapy is usually gate kept to those with expensive insurance plans. Medicare, if it covers it at all can easily have a 1 year wait list for therapy.
Not to mention that most people get no meaningful vacation time.
Want to quit because you’re burnt out. Even if you have savings you won’t have health insurance. You won’t be able to afford therapy without it.
Get back on the hamster wheel.
I do regret not making a better effort to leave earlier. It’s not going to get better
We can argue if that is fair or not, but if you have a well paying job with good employee provided HC, America is [one of] the best places to be for medical care.
Just to help out there :)
This has been the case in every country I've lived in within Europe (3 and counting). And a mix of rural (50,000 town) and big urban areas.
Employer health plans are only good as long as you pay - if they are good. Lots aren't and they require you to pay so much upfront. Waiting time for specialists and surgeries depend on the area you live in: Not common to wait months for a specialist in the US. You won't get seen if you can't pay for the doctor upfront and medicines are expensive.
I moved from the US (Indiana) to Norway. I've never had an issue seeing a doctor or dentist if I'm sick or in pain since I've been here. I can plan routine things in advance, but I don't need to plan months in advance. I'm just not getting in the same day because they save those times for folks that are sick and need seen sooner. I'll never have a bill if I'm hospitalized. Doctors tend to offer less invasive treatments first - they would have tried to avoid a knee replacement. And if the wait was long (which again, really isn't different from the states, depending on where you are and if you have money enough), the safety net helps out. Reduced work hours and paid time off work and stuff like that. The emergency room sends folks home with medicine instead of expecting you to go to the pharmacy afterwards! ER waiting times aren't longer and honestly, I can call ahead and suffer at home instead of in a waiting room if it isn't actually an emergency, but need urgent care. My partner was seen immediately when he cut off part of his finger, I was seen immediately when I had severe pain, but you'll wait longer for an uncomplicated broken bone and things like that.
And this is all relying on the public system - People can get shorter waiting times if they use the private system.
This is very much location- and provider-dependent, regardless of rural or urban setting. You also have to factor in that some doctors do not work at a single clinic but may schedule their week to spend certain days at one facility and the rest at others (ex. Monday and Thursday at Facility A, Tuesday and Wednesday at Facility B, Fridays off) which can limit the ability to see them in the same week especially if the facilities are not owned by the same organization.
Healthcare access and quality aren’t consistent. Some states or areas in the same state will have better providers than others. Some health insurances will cover things without question and others may fight against you on covering things.
I recently had knee surgery and hit my deductible due to the procedure but insurance billed me for full price on part of the it because they deemed it to be “experimental and unnecessary.” There was some back-and-forth between the surgeon’s office, my insurance, and myself to understand why only a part of it wasn’t covered. This was an additional $1,200 that eventually I had to pay for; even after paying $1,100 up front because of my high-deductible health plan. I’m financially stable enough to cover it without it destroying my savings but this kind of surprise isn’t uncommon for US citizens even with recent laws trying to make costs more predictable.
For more urgent enquiries with an NHS doctor I can usually get a phonecall next day, and they'll ask me to come in if it's serious. For routine/non-urgent stuff you might wait a week or two.
Obviously this is going to vary depending on where you live, and the NHS is not without it's problems... But it's essentially free and a wonderful thing.
[0] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/02/19/uk-nhs-doctor-s...
Can you share a reference for that statistics?
FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.
There is also the same private healthcare that americans enjoy. You have the option of spending $50 to $100 to go to a private clinic and get same-day admission. In the US services like that cost nearly 10 times the price due to the whole insurance bullshit.
I got free same-day heart check-up and $80 paid same-week heart monitoring check-up.
There are horror stories and footage of the UK NHS, but that's mostly just london and in reality pretty much every city that large suffers from that.
For a vaccination I'll call several weeks in advance. If I want an appointment before/after work I'll call well in advance, if I want something tomorrow they may say "11:30, take it out leave it", which isn't great for my work.
Don't trust whoever wrote what you read there. FUD scaremongers.
I am in the EU and I can do that too?
All the US has done is allow for massive amounts of wealth hoarding and gaslighting of a significant portion of the population into voting and supporting things against their own beliefs or common sense.
If you said “China allows red dye 12 in their food and it’s been proven to cause cancer” they’d freak out about it. But they don’t see any problem back home.
Incredible that this is the country that has been the dominant global exporter of technological innovation, pop culture and economic policy for so long.
https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings#:~:text=NUMBER%20OF%20SHOO...
One could suspect that the number in the next decade should be between 2000-3000 incidents. Since 2000 is a bigger number than 1 yes more than once a decade.
Mass shootings more broadly are even worse with 167 in Jan-June 2026.
We can't do anything to fix the root cause because the root cause is an inviolable Constitutional right.
So we simply must accept that school shootings/mass shootings/gun violence in general are the price we pay to be able to shoot watermelons and the occasional politician and remain the only truly free nation on earth.
It happens, it's just statistically so unlikely to ever happen to your kid, that the drill essentially serves as ideological propaganda reinforcing fear of the idea of the threat far above and beyond the statistical risk actually posed by the threat itself.
And as a reminder, Europe sees more people die to heat than America sees people die to guns.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/heat-death-europe-ac-american...
Maybe your guild should figure out how to beat the PvE server before lecturing the players on the PvP server on how ridiculous you think our freedom is. Major skill issue, noob.
The US welcomes more people legally than any other country in the world[0], and half of its politicians think welcoming illegal immigrants is a good idea too.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/migration?tab=line&coun...
Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.
So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.
And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.
I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.
For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).
Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.
Why is this better factually, not ideologically.
Also narrowing the gap is a way to raise the floor including in absence of growth while raising the floor without narrowing the gap depends on growth. But I think this is not too relevant in practice because taking a lot of money from a few wealthy people will often result in rather small changes as the money has to be spread among a lot of people.
[1] 1.99 % if we want to be precise.
But the reply to that is that it is orthogonal to the discussion. Power should be distributed in a way that increases efficiency and not just for the virtue of doing so.
I generally agree that if it was true that the inequality would lead to consistent floor raising it would be fine, but it doesn't.
And reeks of the same sort of reallocation fallacy that makes people think the rich making too much makes them poor.
If we really just say 4xd everyone’s salary in America. Prices are gonna rapidly rise in everything.
Things don’t get materially better unless we build the material things we need. We need to come up with a way to build more houses. Lower the cost of healthcare. Not just increase everyone’s money supply.
To say the results are suspect is understating things.
My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.
This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.
So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.
Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.
I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.
You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.
GDP is not "the amount of money in a country".
GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year).
The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dollars).
I realize Fortune magazine isn't The Economist, but I'd still expect PhDs in political science opining on economic topics to at least understand the difference between stocks and flows.
if you paint a masterpiece worth millions and keep it in your closet it has negligible impact on GDP. only once it is sold does it have an effect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37395566
You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.
"then why not make sleeping illegal? obviously there's a limit"
This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).
You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.
Only ~1% of people in the US make federal minimum wage. ~58% of that 1% are serving related occupations who collect tips that are not counted in BLS wage data.
You need to use median wage - which is ~$24 for all occupations.
This is, in the immortal words of Norm McDonald, some "commie gobbledygook". I don't think there is any "newspaper", as in traditional print publication, left worth reading.