• Knightfox@lemmy.one
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    8 months ago

    I was trying to say that being big country does not prevent one from having universal healthcare, decent social security and a lot of other social benefits.

    For this I’ll refer to another comment I made

    My point was more that it’s hard to make Federal government comparisons between small European countries and the US. A topic like healthcare or education varies greatly municipality to municipality and state to state. A city like Washington DC or NYC might be a better comparison to Belgium, but Butte Montana isn’t. If you’re trying to compare the US average to the Belgium average you have to average Butte in with NYC.

    Decisions such as universal healthcare and national public transportation are Federal decisions and so it’s hard to make a comparison between something like the Netherlands and Moscow.

    If you want Netherlands compared to something with similar polulation, density and budget, Moscow(which as saying goes is not Russia) is a good choice. Aaaand it’s still shit compared to Netherlands. Or Netherlands can be compared to city that was built by dutch long time ago - Saint Petersburg. Shit too. Small polulation? SPb+LenOblast is even worse.

    I don’t know much about these regions so all I can do it point to the statistics.

    Moscow Metro Area

    -Average Salary: ~1,100,000 RUB/year = ~24,000 Euro/year

    -Area: ~48,000 km^2

    -Population: ~21.7 million

    Saint Petersburg Metro Area

    -Average Salary: ~1,3700,000 RUB/year = ~24,000 Euro/year

    -Area: ~11,000 km^2

    -Population: ~6.2 million

    I don’t know enough about how the internal workings of the Russia Federal government works to speak authoritatively. What I can say is that even with similar size and population the citizens of the Netherlands make nearly double the income of the most wealth places in Russia.

    In other examples I compared the percentage of income that goes to funding healthcare in the US vs Belgium (~10-15%) either in the form of taxes or direct payments. Looking at this site (https://www.internationalinsurance.com/health/systems/russia.php) only the employer makes a tax contribution on behalf of the employee and it equates to ~2-3% of the employee’s salary. All of Russia spent ~88.2 billion Euros on Helathcare in 2020 while the Netherlands spent ~107 billion in 2022.

    For the same reasons why it’s hard to compare Belgium to the US it’s hard to compare the Netherlands to Russia.