I pay the top tax rate her in germany, plus around 1.000 € each month for my health insurance. I could save on the latter by choosing a private insurance, but I belive in solidarity and all that bullcrap. I still think the top tax rate should be higher while taxes for lower incomes should be lower.

I honestly couldn't care less if I paid more taxes. The only thing that would happen is that my balance would rise a little less each month. But I still could not spend all the money I make. And I'm not even insanely rich with an income that varies between 5.000 and 10.000 € each month (freelancer).

Then again, I'm a hardcore leftist, so I don't care too much about money anyway.

Wow, I didn't realize German premiums went that high.

Even here in the U.S, 1.000 euros ($1,070) per month is very steep for what I am assuming is individual coverage. That is pretty much the monthly per capita spending on healthcare (including all costs) with no subsidies in the U.S (which is double what it is in the rest of the developed world), but most people get some form of subsidies (employer, medicare, medicaid, or ACA.) The average family coverage is about $1,100 per month to put things in perspective.

My roommate is self-employed and he pays about $250 /month (after subsidies, government pays $400 /month) for a $1,500 deductible plan with a yearly out-of-pocket maximum of $5,000. 

I get fully employer-subsidized premiums currently, but in my previous job I paid about $180 /month (employer paid $360 /month) for a $750 deductible plan with a $2000 out-of-pocket maximum. Before that I was on Medicaid my whole life, and that only had trivial $1-$5 per service copays. No other cost-sharing.

I generally look at the German model as a model the U.S could very easily transition to for universal healthcare, but I am now wondering if single-payer/medicare-for-all makes more sense anyway despite the political obstacles and difficulty of transitioning.

United States varies quite a bit per state. Some states like Texas and Florida have 0% income tax but make it up somewhere else. Texas for instance while it has 0% income tax has very high property taxes. On the other end of the spectrum California has tax rates between 1-12.3% with an additional 1% for anything over a million. Federal taxes are anywhere from 12-37% and capital gains on taxes range from 0-23.8%

For Brazil

Anual income - Quote - Amount to discount on current bracket
Up to R$ 22.847,76 - Isent -R$ 0
R$ 22.847,77 to R$ 33.919,80 - 7,5% - R$ 1.713,58
R$ 33.919,81 to R$ 45.012,60 - 15% - R$ 4.257,57
R$ 45.012,61 a R$ 55.976,16 - 22,5% - R$ 7.633,51
above R$ 55.976,16 - 27,5% - R$ 10.432,32
This means that let's say you make R$60k (12k USD) on a year after deducting how much you paid in retirement, social taxes, etc you would pay 15.6k in taxes.

Minimum wage in Brazil is about R$ 1.1k/month (14.6k/year) and average income is about 3k/month 40k/year. Which in dollars mean a minimum wage of 200-250USD and annual of 2.5-3kUSD.

Besides that income tax we have the product taxes that can go from like 15% on more essential things to 70% in things like tobacco.

In average brazil pay 45-55% of their income on taxes every year.

In Australia we do have medicare, however if you earn over a certain amount of money you have to pay a medicare levy surcharge of 1.5% on top of the base medicare levy.

To avoid the surcharge, you cat get a private health plan. Depending on what benefits you want, for a family, it can range from say $250/month AUD to $1000/month AUD.

Some states also charge the private health company additional state levy for health so it adds to that.

For example, when I worked in another state I was paying $80/month AUD for private health, which was far less than the surcharge levi, so made sense to get the private health cover.

When I moved interstate that jumped to $130/month AUD because the state had a $50 levy too. TBH I don't mind it as I can see how much better the healthcare system is here compared to the other state I was in.   Over time with inflation that went up. I now pay about $710/month AUD, but it is the best plan they had on offer back in the day. This used to cover me and my wife, now it also covers my child and costs the same, so effectively $236 per person.

In contrast if we didn't pay for private health cover, we would be out $340/month in surcharges between us, so it is effectively like us paying an extra $370 a month. The benefit of that $370 is we can skip public hospital queues and go to a private hospital, so over all I think it is worth it then paying a surcharge to go into the public system and wait for as long as required.

Yeah I am familiar with the Australian system on an abstract level. Listened to this podcast that compared two sisters during their maternal care: one who used the private system and the other who used the public one. Pretty decent podcast that gives a good idea about the system in general. 

https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/impact?selected=VMP1376545152

It is impressive how cost-efficient the health-care systems are in the (non-U.S) Anglosphere, even for developed world standards. Many European countries seem to have either have much higher payroll taxes or higher premiums for the same results. 

A 2% Medicare levy is less than what Americans pay for Medicare, which is exclusive to 65+ year olds (~19% of the population) and has significant cost-sharing/premiums. Every American worker pays 1.45% of our income for Medicare, and our employers match it. Yet it isn't universal. 

This is largely because the biggest problem isn't necessarily who pays but the pricing structure. There is a lot of price-discrimination in negotiations between providers/drug-manufacturers and the payors, allowing for producer surplus to be maximized, akin to there being a monopoly and therefore creating a deadweight loss. There is also a lot of price-obscurity, where each hospital/insurer/etc have to employ data teams and pricing analysts or pay an outsourced data company to figure out what the maximum allowable payments should be. Making the system very bureaucratic and cost-inefficient. Basically any universal system would be better from a financial perspective, but seeing people paying 1000 euros/month for health-insurance does make me wonder if some universal systems are better than others. My stance was to just pick the one that required the least political capital to implement, but now I am more hesitant. 

1.45%

Thanks for the correction. I meant to put 1.45%. After the employer contribution that would give 2.9% of total payroll going to Medicare. 

That podcast summarises things well and was surprised they mentioned the death spiral lol. That is true because as I touched on in my original post my health cover started cheap and the plan hasn't changed but realistically it has gone up significantly.

This is partially because the rebate also used to be 30%, which the government used to subsidise and they added means testing to it. So most people on a decent wicket now don't get a rebate so its becomes significantly more than the Medicare levy surcharge, hence why you don't se many young people signup for private health anymore. If the rebate stayed I think more people would take it up again as it is nice to be able to have certain surgeries without having to wait for them in the public system.

Normally the employer pays half of that. But since I'm a freelancer, I don't have an employer so I have to pay everything myself. So if you're employed somewhere, it isn't that bad. What I'm paying is also the top rate, it doesn't get higher than that no matter how much I earn. Plus my son is insured without extra cost.