Comment by ben_w

My understanding (British citizen living in Berlin) is that the German system looks and acts like a tax, but is actually mandatory payments to one of a handful of almost-but-not-quite-identical private insurance companies, with care being free-at-point-of-use.

It's possible to opt out if you're rich enough, but if you change your mind later it's very hard to return to the normal system.

I'm currently not working*, my monthly insurance cost is €257,78.

* thanks to my very cheap lifestyle, my passive income of only about €1k/month means I don't strictly speaking need to work ever again.

Nevertheless, I am treating this time as a learning opportunity with a view to being able to change career path, given that I think LLMs make the "write the code" skill I've been leaning on for the last two decades redundant in favour of, at a minimum, all the other aspects of "engineering", "product management", and "QA", and possibly quite a bit more than that.

Plus, y'know, get that B1 certificate so I can get dual citizenship.