The lower cost for healthcare gap is about $5,000 to $6,000 per person in other developed nations vs the US.
It doesn't come close to offsetting the far higher US skilled salaries figures compared to Europe.
When US university costs were far lower circa year 2000, that also didn't imply a narrower gap with Europe on skilled salaries. University costs are a phenomenon caused by the US Government destructively backing ever higher education loan increases, causing a spiral of fees by universities. It wasn't caused by higher US wages (which have existed for a very long time).
That is better explained by a simple fact: the US has far higher economic output per capita than Europe.
Before this decade is out, the US will double the GDP per capita of France, Japan, UK. Unless they all snap out of stagnation soon. It's not that the US is growing super fast, it's that most developed countries haven't been growing much at all for the last ~12-13 years.
Health insurance may not be so bad for a $300K+ SV software engineer, but it's terrible for just about everyone else. My wife's a teacher and for a while we had to use her health insurance, which meant getting the "family plan" option through her school district.
The cost of that? Half her take-home pay. And it's not even a very good plan (i.e. we were still exposed to a lot of risk, we had a couple medical things come up in the same span of time and were out several thousand more dollars for those).
Now, sure, I make way more money than her so we were fine, but her single-parenting colleagues? The couples in which both are teachers? They're not so lucky. And more jobs pay way closer to a teacher's salary, and may have even worse health benefits, than pay anything like SV software developer money.
Half may be an exaggeration, but for normal people losing 15-30% of their post-tax income to healthcare is probably about right. And of course we're already paying Medicare & Medicaid taxes on top of that.
Thanks for sharing. I didn't know and I still don't know how much typically a (good) health insurance costs. In most countries in Europe, however, it doesn't justify the lower salaries in the SW industry.
It doesn't come close to offsetting the far higher US skilled salaries figures compared to Europe.
When US university costs were far lower circa year 2000, that also didn't imply a narrower gap with Europe on skilled salaries. University costs are a phenomenon caused by the US Government destructively backing ever higher education loan increases, causing a spiral of fees by universities. It wasn't caused by higher US wages (which have existed for a very long time).
That is better explained by a simple fact: the US has far higher economic output per capita than Europe.
Before this decade is out, the US will double the GDP per capita of France, Japan, UK. Unless they all snap out of stagnation soon. It's not that the US is growing super fast, it's that most developed countries haven't been growing much at all for the last ~12-13 years.