alt Hacker NewsJesus, you people are certainly something...
> We can probably safely call this a wash.
Does it tho? Cause in Germany there are no deductibles or co-pay. How many hours do your nurses work for the money? How man vacation days are included.
Btw. the median income in Germany is 52,159 Euro.
> Germany has overall notoriously high living costs.
According to this site, US is 21% more expensive than Germany:
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/germany/unite...
> I used to be baffled as to why Germans typically have no AC, only small appliances, often no clothesdryer, etc. Then after learning this I realized that for an average person, running American-style appliances would be totally unaffordable.
Are you comparing Idaho to Germany? Cause Californians have to pay more for electricity than Germans.
0.23€/kWh is the current price for electricity in Germany. We don't have ACs, because we got well insulated homes and live in a rather cold climate. Modern houses are equipped with heat pumps which can do both. Yes, we now widely heat houses with unaffordable electricity!
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/Strompreis-aktuell-So-vi...
> Does it tho? Cause in Germany there are no deductibles or co-pay.
By the time we're quibbling about deductibles and co-pay, we're not talking about meaningful differences - and of course, it can vary widely. However, when your employer is the medical system, your insurance is usually pretty good.
> How many hours do your nurses work for the money?
36-40 hours is a typical workweek. Around here, it's 36 hours.
> How man vacation days are included
This is, as well-known, not federally mandated, and can vary widely. Leave is also often lumped into many different categories. A look at my local, poor rural hospital system says they get 200 hours of PTO a year starting out, or five weeks, plus holidays.
> 0.23€/kWh is the current price for electricity in Germany
Maybe something has changed. This was what I looked at, and that's not what my friend is paying right now. It's only twice as high as California, which is not representative of the US as a whole.
https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/862768/b159d13929f17...
> We don't have ACs, because we got well insulated homes and live in a rather cold climate.
Yes, and having an AC would put a stop to the German obsession with opening windows to stop mold from forming. But even though climate control would be very convenient even if most of the time it's not necessary, Germans don't have it because they can't afford it. Because professions like nursing are paid too little.
Why is there such resistance to just paying people more? How on earth does it make more sense to import people to pump up the labor supply, suppressing wages, so that you have to continue to import people, because there's no reason for a German to go into a low-paid field with a bad work environment?