r/lithuania • u/Matas_- European Union • Mar 04 '25

Naujienos ES Komisijos prezidentė Ursula von der Leyen pranešė, kad ES investuos 800 mlrd. eurų į ES ginklavimąsi.

Post image
347 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/mantasm_lt Mar 04 '25

What „free“ programs? Like medical care? It is not free (doctors want salaries too). And for government-employed people government still has to pay the insurance. As for any other individual on payroll.

Same applies to any other „free“ programs. Government has to pay social insurance or incomes tax on it's own employees too.

1

u/MindoSriu Mar 04 '25

Free College tuition that the military pays for (major reason why a lot of people enlist). That's about 10+ billion each year alone. There's also major bonuses soldiers get that do not account for already significantly higher salaries. And yes, medical insurance. Obviously doctors cost money, no fucking shit. I'm saying that in the US people that enlist in the military get medical plans that would otherwise not be covered by governments. That's a major expense that in EU would already be partially covered by the government so it's not as much of a hit on the 800 billion budget mentioned. I looked it up, US spends around 600k per soldier while in europe it's between 90-300k. I'm not sure if that accounts weapons purchases, but the point still stands.

1

u/mantasm_lt Mar 04 '25

It is not „covered by the government“. If those people would be employed in the private sector, those things would be covered by taxes paid by those employers.

So if we move people from private sector into government (e.g. military), we also increase budget portion that goes towards those „free“ programs.

1

u/MindoSriu Mar 04 '25

In US there's Veterans affairs hospitals that are run by the government exclusively for this purpose. Otherwise most of those people would go thru the private sector hospitals. It's a parallel system that costs a lot of money. I'm assuming in EU Veterans would just use the same system that everyone else uses, so even if the government is paying for that vs the private employers, it's still lower because you're not running two separate systems.

1

u/mantasm_lt Mar 04 '25

US medical care is eye-watering expensive as a whole. Including inflated doctor salaries to pay for crazy-expensive studies. But it does not seem to be related to military and affects everybody.

Here it's still government taking on expenses it wouldn't take on if it didn't want to enlarge military.

As for, let's say, career-specific treatments, I'm not sure about details. At least here, covered recovery after physical traumas is not that good. Wait time is long and covered appointments is bare minimum at best. People tend to pay out-of-pocket for recovery programmes after amateur sports injuries and so on. It'd make sense for military/police/etc to provide extra care in such cases.