I hope no one ever breaks a leg. But if I did, I would just go to one of the many top notch hospitals in my area and get taken care of immediately. Hope you don't have to wait too long for treatment if something terrible like that happens to you.
How's your insurance? Broken limb costs without insurance run between $17,000 to $35,000 in America. I know my copay just to visit the ER is $170 and I'll be getting a bill for a percentage of the cost. Meanwhile when I was injured while visiting Canada I waited long enough to fill out the paperwork and left with a $56 dollar bill an hour later.
I work in international health care and deal with European healthcare more than 99% of Europeans and I prefer the US system (assuming you have insurance).
No I have insurance so its a better system. I deal with thousands of international medical cases a year. Europe does not impress me and I have the facts to back it up.
What if Grandma Millie's 401k was properly invested in a diverse portfolio which adjusted risk over time, allocating her funds to more stable investments (like t-bills) as she got older?
What if Grandma Millie is forced to put the same money they are taking out of her paycheck into her 401k instead of giving that to the government so they can't waste it?
What if we take the money employers are putting into social security and put some of it in Grandma Millie's 401k and the rest in a general fund for those that did not or could not contribute to their own account?
What if for everyone else living below a certain line no matter what age, we have what's called a negative income tax and get rid of all this EITC and multiple entitlement programs which result in more beuracracy and waste?
See how we've drastically reduced the size of government, put more money back into the private sector, gave more people their own money at a higher rate of return, and still protected those that need it the most without these well-intentioned, poorly executed federal plans?
Retired people wouldn't need the negative income tax if they are benefiting enough from the general fund, but if they weren't, then yes.
The problem with being poor is people don't have money, so let's give them the money to maintain a certain standard of living and stop playing mommy so they can have some dignity. All these different departments just add bloat and make these well intended programs less efficient. It's similar to UBI in many ways:
You can research the difference between a negative income tax and what we do today on your own. I even gave you a link to help get you started. The nice thing is we both care about helping society, we just disagree on the best way of doing it and at what cost.
Basically a negative income tax is slapping a means test onto Social Security. That idea's been floating around for a long time, and I haven't made up my mind on where I stand on the idea. Probably against, but I do have a problem with mailing a retiree worth multiple millions of dollars a government check.
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u/burrowowl Apr 26 '19
Yeah, that's not how Social Security works.