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Less yanks hating China is good, but more Chinese people hating the US is even better (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
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[–] 79 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I knew US healthcare was fucked up, but I had my moment of disbelief when a colleague with dual citizenship tried to explain to me what Americans go through to pay their taxes. I literally thought he was lying to me because surely every state in the world wants to make it as easy as possible for people who want to pay their taxes to actually do so. But the US is exceptional I guess.

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  • [–] 65 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I had to repeatedly explain to an American that the £107 she paid at the hospital was actually the entire cost she had to pay the NHS after they set her broken leg and put a cast on it, and there wasn't another bill coming for the rest. Then had to explain there wasn't a separate bill for the ambulance, and that the £107 was the increased cost non-UK citizens pay. She was convinced she was going to be paying £1000+ even with her insurance.

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  • [–] 50 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    My partner was in a car accident and they needed surgery and a month stay in a hospital along with another month of physical therapy. Total cost? $560,000 big, beautiful US dollars. While they were in the ER still, we had to lawyer up and start suing. It's a disastrous system.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    It's a disastrous system.

    I think about this a lot. It literally is a disaster, a complete catastrophe; but Americans are so used to it that it’s invisible like the air around them. It’s too bad the term woke was co-opted because it really is like waking up. It doesn’t have to mean waking up to capitalism and becoming a Marxist. It can simply mean seeing through the veil of capitalist realism and the extremely bad situation we’re already in.

    If we took a system that our country does reasonably well — let’s say food safety — and fucked it up as badly as our healthcare, I think people would be extremely unhappy. But with healthcare we’ve just never had it good to begin with.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I've started calling it out. My mom is specifically getting pissed off about it and it's cracking me up. Any casual it's just the way it is comment gets met with a no. You are allowing this to happen right now and stating it is what it is is defeatist. Eventually they gotta wake up to the reality we should be killing every single heathcare insurer and insurance worker till it's resolved. We pay them to deal with the care for us. So we also need to attack them when they completely fucking fail us.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago

    Tax preparation services are literally a ~$40B/year industry in the US and they lobby Congress to prevent changes. It seems like the only two options are to either keep things as-is or "simplify" the tax code which would be cloaked in something like a flat tax which would be a massive giveaway to the wealthy.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago*

    Nha, in Mexico we follow a similar system, except for some people the tax filing is every month. So they spend 3 or 4 days a month paying their taxes. I am an unregistered lumpen, so I don't pay income or payroll tax. And this it doesn't affect me. This is the situation for most people. But I tried to start a small business a few years ago, and the process to register for taxes was so bizantine I gave up. Mind you, this was during the pena nieto regime when they came up with a simplified mode for small business, it was way worse before, and I hear it is much more complicated now.

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