Gas taxes don't go to health care, Payroll and income taxes are the main source of money for health care. Gas tax goes to things like road construction and such.
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All creative accounting........in fact your government requires "X" dollars to support your system, you can manipulate the sources of funding to accomplish that goal, but the bottom line is that the "total taxation" that you pay is what funds all the social services that you receive. You also have VAT (hidden) taxes on goods and services that go to your General Fund. Balance transfers are a simple budgetary gimmick that ALL governments use to cloud the manner in which money is spent.
Our gasoline taxes also supposedly go to road construction and maintenance, but if you look at the actual accounting, they all go into the "General Fund", that is raided for everything discretionary that government spends.
In the case of the US (before ObamaCare), as a free people, we were at liberty to "pay as you go" for health care........buy insurance or not, the responsibility is upon the citizen. In your case you are paying for health care everytime you earn or purchase anything, whether you need to use it or not.
Historically we as Americans have opted for personal responsibility.......we don't need the government dictating what services we are "entitled to", and taxing the hell out of us to pay for them for everyone, or how we live our lives in general.........it's a different mindset.
I fully realize that as a Canadian, it is hard for you to understand the "American mentality", when it comes to our attitude about government.........but it is what it is........
We WOULD, however, appreciate if your countrymen are so satisfied with your system, stay on your side of the border when you need urgent aggressive cancer treatment, transplant surgery, or any other form of cutting edge medical care. In summary, you chose your system.....live with it.........
My closest friend was Chief of Neurosurgery at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit for over a decade, handling the riskiest, most complex cases in brain surgery, and over 60% of his patients were Canadian subjects who simply could not receive the needed procedures under NHS. Although NHS might be fine for relatively healthy people, it is the advanced medicine where it falters.......your system is simply incapable of attracting the talent and the infrastructure required to do anything other than routine services with any competence, and to that you have to add the vast level of bureaucratic administrative costs that government management incurs, making it more costly still
We're off-topic though.......[/threadjack]
doc