Published October 21, 2019
France and Germany are good examples of large continental European countries that have extensive publicly funded health insurance programs. France pays for it with a series of taxes on everyone’s wages. Employers pay 13 percent of an employee’s total salary (or 7 percent for wages not exceeding 2.5 times the minimum wage) for health insurance. Employees pay 9.7 percent for “social security” surcharges (in France, this refers to all transfer programs, not just retirement pensions) and debt repayment on up to about 98 percent of their total salaries. So that’s a payroll tax rate of up to 22.7 percent for social services, as economists largely agree that the employer’s share of a payroll tax ultimately falls on the employee in the form of lower wages.
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Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
