Are we ready to pay for ‘free’ health care?

The Detroit News reports:

Here’s a question that puzzles many Americans whenever the debate over health insurance reform erupts: All other major industrialized nations provide universal health care to their citizens, why can’t the United States?

The answer is, of course, we can. But like everything else, it ain’t free, despite what the socialists among us would have us believe.

The real question isn’t whether we can have national health care, it’s whether Americans really want to pay for it.

National health care countries pay for the benefits through tax rates that would be considered unbearable by most Americans.

In the U.S., 90 percent of earners pay a real tax rate—income and payroll taxes combined —of below 20.3 percent, according to the Peterson Foundation. The average real tax rate in the European Union is 45 percent.

In the states with the highest social spending, tax rates are highest. France, for example, has an average real tax rate of 57.5 percent; Belgium 56.9 percent; Germany 52.3 percent; and Sweden 47 percent.

While the U.S. has pursued a policy of relieving the tax burden on lower-income workers —nearly half of wage earners pay no federal income tax — Europe’s middle class gets no such break.

In Belgium, for example, Pew Research estimates a married couple, one working at the average wage and one at two-thirds of it, with two kids bears a total tax burden of 38.3 percent.

An article well worth your time: because socialism isn't free.