• TCB13@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Paid health care is way worse. (…) Most articles say Portugal healthcare is better or on par with America’s system for patient outcomes.

    It may be but at the same time since COVID our healthcare has been a total mess. Waiting lists are crazy, sometimes you can’t get simple tetanus vaccines or you can’t get healthcare unless it’s something really urgent because there aren’t any doctor to attend you on a regular basis.

    Have a look at this https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2022-05-03/hospital-waiting-times-concerning-portuguese/66794 and https://www.statista.com/statistics/1477807/portugal-waiting-time-by-medical-specialty/. When you’ve to wait 120 days for a cardiology consultation you’ll most likely die in the meantime. There are a lot of cases of people waiting months or even years for simple surgeries.

    A guaranteed pension is super strong versus a retirement plan that is in the stock market because a crash could wipe out the whole fund.

    Well the thing is that we don’t really know how guaranteed it will be and what values we will be talking about in a few years. Maybe minimum wage for everyone independently of the money you payed each month of your working life - it’s looking a lot like that and that’s not fair at all.

    Lastly why isn’t the rich not paying more in salaries and why isn’t money more equitable In Portugal?

    Because it’s hard for most companies to pay employees 30k or more. Consider this, for a 30k income the employee will pay 37-43% income tax + 11% social security, then the employer pays another 11% among other useless crap and legal compliance stuff.

    To be fair if you look at millionaires in Portugal the biggest majority came from somewhere else. It’s really hard to make money in these economic context, people have almost no disposable income it’s a race to the bottom in every market, large monopolies rule over sectors backed by corrupt politicians.

    The country needs more entrepreneurs and businessman but they can’t survive the corporate taxes, crazy interests on loans and all the crazy regulations put in place to gatekeep new companies from the market.

    • BaldManGoomba@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      It is the same in the usa for healthcare unless you can spend money. Sometimes people will save for a year so they can take a day or week off for surgery.

      Sounds like less of a tax problem and more of a things are to expensive problem. Or government needs to regulate more problem and you have corrupt politicians. All these companies are profitable right? Then they can pay more.