this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
707 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
44152 readers
1009 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Insurance (am American)
In some ways, Australia is actually worse than America. Not like, in terms of how "good" the overall system is. We've got you way beat there. But in terms of it being "a scam".
We have a really good public healthcare system called Medicare. But, if you're over 30, you're required to take out private health insurance anyway, or you pay the "Medicare Levy Surcharge" if you have above certain thresholds of income. This levy is not marginal, so you could theoretically take home less pay after getting a pay raise if it puts you over the next threshold.
Additionally, if you later do sign up for private health insurance, you pay an addition levy of 2% on top of the normal premiums for every year you waited. So sign up at 40 and you pay 20% more for insurance than you otherwise would have.
All this means more funding being funneled into the private health sector, taking resources away from the public system, increasing wait times for non-urgent procedures—except for those willing and able to pay to cut the queue. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.
WTF? This makes no sense whatsoever
Welcome to the Australian Government!
Their logic is "it gets people out of the public system to take burden out of the public system". Neglecting completely the economies of scale that would be involved if the public system got all of that funding.
They have a similar attitude towards education. Private schools get a lot of funding (though thankfully not the scammy consumer-side incentives) from the government on the theory that they take students out of the public school system.
"Welcome to capitalism!"
FTFY
These guys have been ridiculing the AU government for years about everything
https://youtu.be/kecnSHmznic
I wish they had the budget and time to do the same to the US government
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/kecnSHmznic
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
conservative governments in Australia have been trying to kill off medicare and other public services for a long time. the problem is our progressive governments have refused to push back hard enough as it always results in election losses.
Basically the people are stupid, the media influences them, and the government is too spineless to take the risk needed to fix things.
Totally. Make a claim and suddenly your rates skyrocket. I’m trying to figure out what I have been paying for.