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Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive.

For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.





In Taiwan you can be on NHI within 6 months of arrival on certain visas. Once you get permanent residency, you're always eligible so long as you keep making monthly payments, which cap out at around 45$usd/month. NHI makes an MRI cost less than 100$ usd. If you don't have NHI you can pay iirc 300$ for an MRI, 100$ for an emergency room visit with blood draw and IV, maybe ~30$/month for buproprion over the counter.

For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.

> Germany always pays the bill

I dont think many people realise just how much European infrastructure Germany actually bankrolls. It is a lot.


Back of the envelop calculation: Portugal gets about 33 “Kampfpanzer Leopard 2” worth of money from Germany via the EU.

If this truly finances universal healthcare in Portugal for everyone, the Portuguese should run the world.


Salaries are low and equipment/infrastructure is top notch so the overall deficit per year is about a billion EUR, which is the extra they deduct from our taxes and Germoney. Quality and efficiency of "bang per buck" is decent albeit citizens always complain.

Portuguese did run half the world for a couple of centuries, the most spoken language by natives on the southern part of this planet but quite tiresome to deal with all that, now is more like Italy and prefers quality of life.


My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.

> One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive

For the U.S., yes, I'm assuming Medicare/Medicaid. For overseas: Vietnam and Portugal have affordable systems you can pay into, with private insurance options above that at $1,200 and $5,000 a year.




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