This is a discussion forum. People discuss and debate things.

If you want to 'question my beliefs', you're more than entitled to.



So there's a limit to how many questions you can be asked or points raised? Perhaps you can let us know what it is.

Otherwise, particularly if someone feels that someone else has not coherently answered something, then a discussion continues. That's actually quite normal.

And I have not "twisted" anything. I have taken some of your comments and applied logic to them.

Thus: if the UK is a poor system, as you yourself have implied, then how could a product of it be anything other than below par when compared to a product of something that you regard as a better system?

Just out of interest do you know how much tax and NIS you'd pay on that amount if you lived in the UK ?

We'll ignore the fact that you may also qualify for child and working tax credits and just assume you are a single person paying a mortgage in a provincial town (ie not London).

You don't have to do this in public if you don't want to but it would be interesting to see how much you currently pay for whole life unlimited health cover to include A&E with no restrictions on cost or term for chronic ailments, plus a private pension scheme that will nett you £110 per week from the age of 65 with no time limit and a cost of living rise each year.

Can you also give an indication if you have or don't have unemployment insurance cover for housing and to cover healthcare during a prolonged period of unemployment, again unlimited in its term of cover and amount of potential claims.

Those are just three things to check, your quoted salary is slightly above average in the UK but gives us a good bar to compare with - give us some general idea of what you have to spend to get equivalent cover in a country that has no income tax scheme but no social provisions either.

To be honest i am well out of date with the rate of NIS and Tax bands. but i would imagine its 6-8% NIS and 12-18% tax? but like i said well out of date with them.

Like i said i won't have children till i can afford them and I don't blame or hold anything against people who have children and work but claim tax credits. I only have a problem with people who have children to get benefits in life.

My Medical insurance premium in dubai is roughly $2,500 US. The policy covers me up to 1,000,000 in treatments, in patient & out patient and is direct billing, the excess on the policy is 12quid. obviously there is other benefits to it but they are the main ones. but that doesn't include a pension fund, once i purchased a couple of apartments (main aim is to have a small property portfolio) i will start contributing to a pension fund.

I have unemployment insurance with my bank, it covers my monthly salary for 6months, But i do have savings if anything ever was to seriously happen.

If i am honest that is my salary but not including extras i do. I do freelance business solutions, mainly I help companies set up here because the process to get a trade license isn't and easy process. Each company i set up with a trade license i get around 1,500-2,000 pounds.

I am sure there are policies that cover that here but i don't have one. Dubai is a great city but i wouldn't say its set up for people to retire here.

The $2500 - per annum ?
Its almost impossible to compare a national health service with a private medical scheme because as we all know EVERYONE in the UK is covered with no limits at all on treatments, even in the US they struggle to provide similar cover as insurance companies are very reluctant to lay themselves open to claims of (for example) a kidney failure where 40 years of thrice weekly dialysis may be required - you also have to factor in that a wage earner in a household of two adults and two children has health cover for all of them at no extra cost to his normal NIS contribution - try that with a private provider !

Deductions on a monthly salary of £2500 (£30k pa) are approx £357 income tax and £220 NIS, if we take the old rule of thumb that NIS was introduced to cover health and pension then a person on £30k is paying £2600 per annum for complete unrestricted access to whatever healthcare they need for a whole family (if the only earner in the house) plus a retirement pension.

I have re-iterated this point time and time again with US citizens, usually Republicans who seem to believe that the UK runs some sort of communist society and who insist that they do not want "social medicine" in their great country and every time I ask them if their health insurance alternative is cheaper OR better (either will do) then I am always met with a stoney silence, its a real conversation stopper.

I think £3,866 pa, not £2,600 based on DubaiRL's approx. earnings,

I'm quoting off a current payslip




Even if the NIS is £4000 a year you will be hard pushed to find any country in the world where its cheaper to purchase your own healthcare and your own pension and to give you anything like the cover that the NHS gives its UK citizens, I have yet to see a private healthcare policy that has NO restrictions on claims and which offers ALL of the services of the NHS as standard cover - throw in the state pension too and the fact that your contributions won't increase for cover for non-wage earners in your household and the contributions seem incredible value for money and far from the shambles of a health system that the ex-pats like to p1ss and whine about after reading their exported Daily Mails.

His was net not gross!

Anyway, your analysis is poor. Yes, what you get for your NI IS FANTASTIC because they don't go anywhere near the cost of the NHS or State Pension. Less than £50 billion pa is raised from employees NI. The NHS costs over £100 billion pa and state pensions more than that! Even with employer contributions the NHS alone takes more and pensions as I said even more. So, yes fantastic but only because other taxes and debt is subsidising it.

So when the average person says they've paid in all their lives....etc in fact they've paid nowhere near enough. So, when you tell the Yanks we don't live in some sort of communist state you are not been entirely honest.

Where the welfare state went wrong was not putting aside contributions into a sovereign fund out of which benefits were paid. A couple of years high contributions in the early post -war years to build the fund and we could then pay out of an accumulated fund - which would by now be the worl's biggest sovereign wealth fund. Instead we have the 3rd biggest debt (to GDP) in the world and are broke.

I believe he said that he earned just over 30,000 with no tax to pay (tax free he said) and not after tax.
So is gross and his net are the same tax-wise.

Yes, but if as Jerry wanted we are trying to compare costs of UK tax v insurance we surely need to gross up the £30,000?

His is both nett AND gross as he doesn't pay any tax.

Well setting aside your normal chicken-licken outlook on life, its inarguable that the NHS and state pension is funded from taxation and is largely free of cost at the point of delivery to anyone with a NI number.

Look at your payslip every month and a portion of the deductions go to both provisions, how much of that is irrelevant really as you cannot obtain the same cover even if you used the whole of your monthly deductions to go out and purchase a healthcare and pension plan.

The correspondent from Dubai has already pointed out that the cost of living is high there and seemingly excellent salary packages are mitigated by this - and that was my point, that and an answer to the usual belly-aching from some about the NHS, the idea that governments can levy taxation and provide nothing back in turn is obviously unworkable, the delivery of first class healthcare, pensions, and education in return for taxation is to me the indicator of a very civilised society, the refusal to implement state healthcare in return for taxation is to me the sign of the ultimate uncaring selfish society where only money-grabbing counts.

I don't have a payslip.

I agree about taxation and being civilised but that's not what you were saying before.

I said a couple of pages back that for the sake of the discussion we would assume the original 1948 ethos that NIS was for health and pension provision and whilst that is not the case at all these days its still a point to start from - but even if you take the other extreme and assume that ALL of your wage slip deductions are for health and pension (they aren't) then we still have a bargain.

It's a bargain because "someone" else is paying for a good part of it - which I guess was rather the point DubaiRL was making?

Except he doesn't earn that and what he would bring to the table in the UK is 30,000 to be subjected to NI (and tax, but we were on about NI).
I think the NI is £2670.14
If he is Class 1.

But if he was in the UK system to get £30,000 in hand the NI would be higher!

Yes it would, but he doesn't have that he only earns £30,000.
So that's what we work on.
He would earn £30,000 gross in the UK.
He earns £30,000 gross in Dubai, not more.

The comparison being made is what does he get for his £30,000 under their tax regime and what does he get for the same wage under ours.

He would be unlikely to earn the same in the UK - each place will have its market rate.

That's very true, but for this particular paper exercise we are comparing the same figure.
Indeed, because he would possibly,as you say, earn less in the UK , then this makes JC's case even more.

Yes - I'm glad you're catching up, social provisions such as healthcare, pensions and education work so well because EVERYONE pays at the point of earning and those who earn more pay more, and in doing so EVERYONE in the country benefits even if you have no children to educate, never get ill in your life and die before you need a pension.

Ironic really that Dubai also have a very good national health service but its not available to non-nationals hence every web site for ex-pats that you look at can't emphasise strongly enough the absolute need for very comprehensive health insurance although some would argue, like the Republicans in the USA, that THAT alone is the reason they go there, the need to feel independent from state control and taxation.

In related issues I see that Jim Davidson has sneaked back into the country to earn some money, probably can't make a living in Dubai with his brand of racism although I would have thought his views on women would be pure gold in the middle east.

It's when you realise how difficult it is to get this point across that you realise how successful (whether misquoted or not) the entire 'there is no such thing as society' things has been.

I know



This propaganda stuff really works doesn't it, in the USA the Republicans (especially) have a deep inbuilt mistrust of central government and some of them take the self-reliance mantra to extremes, I've mentioned it before but in conversations with scholars of the Brigham Young University, who admittedly have other religious reasons to almost declare independance for Utah, use the word "socialist" as an insult, as though its a bad thing for a national government to care for its citizens and they seem a little unsure what their national government is actually there for at all other than one day to crush them all, hence the need for personal armament - they are an amazing breed of people to converse with, absolutely normal on the surface but paranoid to the extreme when you scratch away at them.

If we use JC's £2,600 pa the two principal benefits he cited were NHS and pensions. They cost well over 4 times employee NI contributions, so to make the comparison with Dubai R's $1,500 *which would of course be age dependent) the cost would be c. £11,000pa each year over a working life. To get a state pension would require contributions of c.£1,000pa but lets double that to £2,000 to play safe. So his costs £3,000 pa ours costs £11,000 pa. OK the level of medical provision may differ but is it nearly 4 times better? Yes, the system works for most people but that's because we are neo-Communists!

I haven't a clue what you are babbling on about now or where you are getting your figures from so lets boil it down to its original discussion point - would you be happier in the UK if you had no deductions made from your salary or income but instead had to make all of your provisions for a health and social welfare yourself with the aid of for-profit insurance companies ?

A particularly interesting question in Dally's case as he has a daughter with long-term care and support needs. One wonders what the insurance etc costs would be in relation to her.

Why do people geT so emotional on here? I am not expressing an opinion just laying out the numbers. Employees NI raise less than £50 billion pa. The cost of the NHS plus state pensions is about £230 billion+. So, we need to multiply the £2,600 NI cost by over 4 x (hence the £11,000). To get a state pension, which I guess is c. £120 per week (£6,240 pa) you'd need pension savings of £125,000+. Over 45 years work that would equate to £2,777 pa. But over that time you'd expect growth in the investment and even at a very modest % growth £2,000pa should cover it.