Live in America

I could have moved to the US over the years and would have made more than I do now. I do have a chronic illness that is managed but at times I have needed to be in hospital over the years, so I honestly wouldn't have felt confident in how the US system handles those with illnesses. On top of that, medications I've been on cost a small fortune in the US.

That's not to mention the social problems that are only getting worse under Trump etc.

There's a sold half a million bankruptcies every year and there are tens of millions of uninsured Americans. It reminds me of the Joker's line in The Dark Knight were he says that you're one bad day away from being me.

I've never understood the American temporarily embarrassed millionaire mentality. It's so much easier to be poor over there than to be wealthy.

Fact is, most insurance plans in America do cover essential treatments like chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Not saying it is ideal, but they do have much cheaper sales taxes (vat here at the standard rate is 23%), dearer petrol etc etc.

The milk and honey is not as good as it seems. Florida seems like a great place to live, beautiful climate and NO State Income Tax. Until……….

"The state with the highest home insurance rates happens to be one with no income tax. According to the online insurance marketplace Insurify,

Florida has the nation’s costliest homeowners insurance, with the average annual policy running $10,675 in 2025. Home insurance in Texas, another destination celebrated for having no state income tax, averages $4,789, good for fourth-most expensive in the country."

https://money.com/no-income-tax-states-expensive/

Not happy with Aviva or Allianz or AA with your motor insurance premiums,,,,,,,,

It's a similar story for car owners, who've seen average auto insurance prices increase to $2,324, up nearly 30% in two years. And, yes, according to Insurify,

"many of the states with the highest car insurance prices are places with no income taxes: Nevada has the nation’s sixth-most expensive auto insurance costs (averaging $3,207 for full coverage in 2025), and Florida ($2,967) comes in eighth."

Do they?

It's the most inefficient and most expensive system in the world. There is nothing to admire there.

25% of people in that survey said that they had either been denied coverage or facing delays:

But there is an undercurrent of frustration in the findings, too, with nearly one-quarter of respondents saying they’d been denied coverage or faced a delay from their insurance in the last two years.

It does seem like there's not a lot of political will to change it and most Americans have no idea how other systems such as Germany's public insurance or Britain's National Health Service work. One thing I've noticed consuming American culture for most of my life is that certain topics are just forbidden. One is healthcare. Another is guns. Poverty is another. Of course there are exceptions but they are quire rare.

Comparisons can be hard to make, like some US states like Tennessee, Florida and 6 others don't have a state income tax, but then they will also be the states with much higher insurance rates, property taxes and toll roads. So on paper they look great for net income, but that advantage could be more than eaten up by higher expenses.

A relation in Florida was telling me that insuring her Corolla now costs over $300 a month in Florida, in large part due the high rate of uninsured drivers there. There's supposedly a real problem with aging boomer drivers who can't afford/get insurance anymore but can't live independently without a car, so they keep driving and crashing in increasing numbers. House insurance is really high and practically impossible in storm surge areas.

I visited an elderly relative there years ago and it was really weird, so much of it is people living in gated communities.

I went to the US as a young lad decades ago, back when we had very high unemployment here, it was around 20% at one stage in my hometown in the 80s. I was glad of the opportunity but a few things really jarred with me. When Ireland made the evening news in the US then it was because a car bomb had just gone off, yet the fatality rate from stray bullets in NY at that time was higher per head than deaths from the Troubles, but few people in NY talked about it. It was normalized.

I think I knew I wouldn't be staying when I came home one evening and saw on the news a kid had killed by a stray bullet on near the metro I'd used that day in Manhattan. I couldn't get used to how normalised it was.

They were more obsessed comparing individual five year get rich plans, and Donald Trump was constantly on Howard Stern talking about how he got the mob out of Atlantic city. BTW he was calling for the hanging of some black kids accused of killing a jogger in central park, years later those kids were exonerated of any crime in what had been a rush for justice. They're only crime was walking while black. They whole thing felt bizarre. I did go back briefly to the west coast, but that was a different type of bizarre.

I see my nieces and nephews now embracing opportunities in the EU, rather than the old anglosphere haunts that my generation mostly went to (I did actually enjoy Australia and NZ, but not England). Plus going to third level elsewhere in the EU can be actually a lot cheaper and probably more useful in the long term with exposure to other languages.

Thankfully I have no family reason to need to go the US anymore, those relatives I used to visit now come here more often, some are making arrangements for a permanent move.

The average annual cost of health insurance in the US is around 9000 dollars.(Employers end up paying a portion of this) You're unlikely to be spending anything near that in Ireland. On top of that, the US government spends drastically more on healthcare per person than the rest of the world, per capita they're at just under fifteen thousand dollars. But still people go bankrupt due to healthcare.

Meanwhile I've got an incredibly sick and has been in hospital for two months. He's in a public hospital, getting fantastic care and none of us have to worry about some massive bill at the end of it.

And Americans have to pay a lot more to maintain their bloated military-industrial complex and disastrous foreign wars. That money would be much better spent on healthcare and infrastructure.

If nobody defended the west it is arguable we would be speaking German or Russian now. You would probably prefer that.

Instead we are known internationally as free-loaders.

Look at Finland and Sweden. They joined NATO very rapidly in the past few years. And spend a lot more on defence than us.

I see we've reached the point of whataboutery and responding to nonsense nobody said. I also noticed that you couldn't explain how the US' various wars made the West safer.

America didn't win WW2. Germany was collapsing and it was being overrun by the Soviets. I don't know where you're getting this drivel from.

You've yet to explain how the trillions of dollars wasted in disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have kept the West safe.

Under Trump, he literally publicly attempted to humiliate Zelensky. He implied that it was their fault that they'd been invaded. They even paused sharing intelligence with Ukraine. So the US have behaved atrociously in relation to Ukraine under Trump.

I'm still waiting to hear about the existential threats posed by Afghanistan and Iraq.

Not as atrociously as Ireland. We are much closer to Ukraine but have not stepped up to the plate with any worthwhile military assistance.