Americans Love Being Nickel and Dimed

The giant chiseling sound is inescapable.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

This week, my wife and I received a letter in the mail informing us that our pediatrician would now be charging $10 a month in order to keep our child on as a patient. There were some other benefits we would supposedly receive in exchange for this $10 a month, such as “after hours access to on-call physicians” or “next business day appointments for urgent illnesses,” “extended patient visits,” plus some other stuff that seemed irrelevant or that I didn’t fully understand.

True, ten dollars a month is less than I pay for Netflix. And considering the relative importance of a healthy child vs. say, being able to binge Love is Blind any time of day, maybe it’s not that much money. At least, not that much if you ignore the part where we already pay close to $1000 a month to an insurance company for the same thing, not including what my wife’s employer contributes on her behalf. She is a nurse, by the way. Yet, given all the other things we already pay for every month, the very idea of being railroaded into a “Netflix for child health” scheme is infuriating. Whenever I think about it, I get the distinct urge to look to the heavens and scream, geriatrically, what is this world coming to???

One thing I know for certain: Americans absolutely love being nickel and dimed.

We were practically founded on it. Insomuch as I believe in the concept of a “national character” at all, ours is that we will always, always fall for the cheaper list price that hides the real cost in a series of escalating tack-ons. We are the Spirit Airlines of countries.

Healthcare, as you may have already gleaned from my opening anecdote, is the most obvious example. No matter how many charts we see that show countries with national healthcare systems are healthier, live longer, and maybe worst of all (to an American) spend less on healthcare, many of us still insist on this patchwork of private insurers, with its constant drip of inexplicable fees for the patient, and for providers, some perverse incentive to consider a “streaming model” as a viable solution. (When I brought up the monthly doctor fee on twitter, a bunch of people responded “how much for no ads?” which is very good joke).

Lots of us would prefer a single payer system, maybe even a supermajority at this point. But when you talk to people who would rather stick with the system we’ve got, their reasons mostly seem to boil down to one thing: a reflexive desire not to have to pay yet another fee.

There is a vast gulf between how much Americans actually pay in taxes and how much we perceive we pay in taxes, and there seems to me a fairly obvious explanation for this. Our paycheck nickel and dimes us every pay period.

If it was just one chunk taken out for taxes, that would be easy to parse (maybe… too easy...). Instead it’s a bunch of weird little acronyms. One huge portion is actually not a tax at all, but a big giveaway to an insurance company so that you and your family can see doctors and obtain necessary medication. Why have one flat fee for everyone, when we can have all this wonderful choice, of provider networks, deductible levels, covered procedures, and participating doctors? You only live once, and we Americans love spending that one life comparison shopping.

Another paycheck chunk generally goes towards our 401K contribution. Which is to say, a giveaway to the financial industry in lieu of a retirement pension. The private sector hacks away a big portion of our paychecks before the government even comes calling. And then, at the end of the year, when tax season rolls around, we have to try to nickel and dime our government back to them, another uniquely American annual ritual, in which we attempt to claw back the maximum allowable number of monies we can, while hedging against the possibility of overdoing it and going to jail.

This is how we love for things to be! A bunch of hidden fucking fees!

Not wanting single payer healthcare system seems insane to me, but I do understand the simple logic of not wanting another big chunk removed from a paycheck. Especially when it’s already so dappled from removed hunks.

Eating out works in much the same way. One of the hardest things for people from other industrialized countries to get used to when they visit or move to the US is tipping. Tacking on 15 or 20% to every restaurant, bar, or coffee shop bill (and I always do 20, it’s the cost of feeling like a good person) is kind of a big ask (even though you should absolutely do it). Even a lot of us Americans only do it reluctantly or not at all (which is evil and wrong even if the reticence is understandable).

Why is this the case? Because we don’t invest enough in the service industries, of course. We want the mendacious sticker price! With maximum tack-ons and just a little more stress every time we have to decide. Baiting and switching makes us cum.

This was what Buddha Lo, an Australian, told me when I interviewed him after he won his first season of Top Chef:

“I’ve always found it a bit weird with the schooling system and the culinary schools. So for example, for me to be a chef, I actually got paid to go to school and I got all these incentives to be a cook. I think that’s what’s affecting our cooking industry in the US is that nobody’s going to go to cooking college, pay thousands of dollars, and then get paid $13 an hour at a good restaurant.”

“I went to culinary school in Australia. They realized that they have a skill shortage in cooks. So they decided instead of people having to pay to go to school, everyone gets paid to go to school. It’s a bit of a different system, but I think that one works because the culinary scene in Australia is amazing. And that’s because a lot of the cooks are able to go to culinary school. It’s not a high-paying job. It’s just like I don’t see anyone wanting to get into this industry and have that sort of student loan hanging over them and then getting paid probably close to nothing.”

All this tipping exists mostly as a way to subsidize debt-saddled chefs, an unusually low minimum wage for workers, and insane rents for the restaurant owners.

But oh yeah, loan debt. My wife and I are both still paying off student loans, despite being in our late 30s or early 40s and having earned above the median income for most of our careers. My friends from other countries curiously do not have this monthly burden. Some even got paid to go to graduate school.

Hopefully without it blowing my thesis too much, this used to be one thing that Americans actually did do well. I got my undergraduate degree in the University of California system, which was free for Californians to attend until 1960. Then Ronald Reagan correctly surmised what would become a foundational truth for every news aggregating algorithm aimed at Boomers: the average homeowner absolutely hates annoying college kids. Reagan made ratfucking the UC system an explicit policy for most of his career, and as a result, we now spend 20 years paying off banks for something that was free for more than 100.

Perhaps you think it’s rich, me railing against this constant nickel and diming on a newsletter that charges a monthly fee (or offers one, at least). Our news media happens to be a perfect example of this phenomenon. In fact, extending the personal anecdote, you used to be able to read my writing for free, on an online outlet that I helped to create. Only our parent company decided it needed to do mass layoffs amid record profits and laid me off last year, with most of the rest of the original staff soon to follow.

What happened to the media industry? Lots of bad shit, really, but probably Hamilton Nolan put it most succinctly in his piece “Public Funding of Journalism is the Only Way”:

Next time that you wonder, “What happened to all the nice newspapers and magazines and perhaps even websites that I remember reading from my halcyon youth?” just imagine Google and Facebook and Amazon as three vampires, sticking a straw into the media business and sucking it dry. The tech platforms figured out how to insert themselves between the news producers and the news audience. The ad money that used to fund news now goes to the tech companies. They took it and now the news companies don’t have it to hire journalists with. That’s why your local paper sucks and your favorite website is dying. When you pull back, it’s pretty simple.

Basically, because public funding for media is essentially a non-starter, and because we decided to stop enforcing antitrust laws that already existed against companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and all of the streamers, we have reverted to form. Which is to say, killing each other with a thousand cuts, from the twelve different streaming companies and 15 different Substacks and Patreons you subscribe to every month (heartfelt thanks here to all my subscribers).

It’s how everything works here. The more you look for it, the more you see this at work, the American strategy of nickel and diming the citizenry in every possible facet of life.

Recently I finished a A Great Improvisation, a book about Benjamin Franklin’s time in France negotiating an alliance during the Revolutionary War (which I read as preparation for an interview with Michael Douglas, who plays Franklin in a streaming series, which is really neither here nor there). Of interest was a particular passage about zealous Frenchmen and their impressions of America once they’d crossed the Atlantic hoping to embody Republican values and kill Englishmen:

Even a diplomatic Frenchman--grappling with the forces that had so shaped Benjamin Franklin--was left to long for a land where people thought about something other than utility. The mercantile spirit infected everything; the mania for commerce was inexplicable. American was a cultural wasteland, its people devoid of conversation.

Apparently our “mania for commerce” has been a constant here since before we were even a country.

We’re desperate to buy, sell, make consumer “choices,” even when it means getting constantly chiseled and driving ourselves to early graves. Lately, the news is full of stories about people from California or New York who moved to Texas or Florida during the pandemic and are now having second thoughts. Turns out, the promise of cheaper rent and no state income tax can belie a bespoke electrical grid, high insurance premiums, expensive healthcare, and… you know, all that typical nickel and diming stuff. How could it turn out any other way? Florida is possibly just the most American of states.

What other country even offers the possibility of making an intranational move as a consumer choice? We love to promise big and gouge relentlessly; a country that essentially began and prospered largely as a real estate scheme. Ah, well. Alas. I was hoping to have something to tie this together at the end here, but I have some insurance plans to compare.