In the article: US slips down development index the BBC shows us to ourselves as they often do. It is hard to find our own press willing to say it as bluntly.
Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed nation, according to a report from several US charities.
So now we are killing ourselves as well as so many others in the world!
The report found that the US ranked 42nd in the world for life expectancy despite spending more on health care per person than any other country.
Overall, the American Human Development Report ranked the world's richest country 12th for human development.
But, we cry, that is because we have better health care. Ummmmm then why are we dying more? Let us examine this beneath the break.
Having spent my life teaching Medical Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists, Dentists, and other health professionals, I have some first hand knowledge about this. It saddens me that it has to be the BBC who points it out again. When I was teaching at Harvard Medical School in the late 1960s, there was a 16 week course given as a kind of "teach in" in Old South Church. It was called "Health University" and was put on by health care professionals at every level. They studied the situation about health care in the US and told us we were heading in this direction. No one listened. The insurance/pharmaceutical/medical hardware industries were destined to take over and there was going to be this "great sucking sound" as our payments to the "industry" would line the pockets of their stock holders more and more. Well, here we are folks! What are we going to do about it? And it isn't just health care.
Among other findings:
Of the world's richest nations, the US has the most children (15%) living in poverty
Of the OECD nations, the US has the most people in prison - as a percentage and in absolute numbers
25% of 15-year-old students performed at or below the lowest level in an international maths test - worse than Canada, France, Germany and Japan
If the US infant mortality rate were equal to first-ranked Sweden, more than 20,000 babies would survive beyond their first year of life
For a number of years I was the chair of the admissions committee for our Biomedical Engineering Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. We used the Graduate Record Exam for all applicants. We had many from India and China. Very often these students educated in foreign countries were off the scale on the high end of the math section of the GRE! The BBC article tells us:
Asian males in the US were found to have the highest human development index score and were expected to live 14 years longer than African-American males, who had the lowest human development index rating.
African-Americans had a shorter lifespan than the average American did in the late 1970s.
More US babies die in their first year than in most other rich countries
The report further breaks down its findings into the US's 436 Congressional districts.
The 20th district, around Fresno, California, was ranked last - with people earning one-third as much as residents of the top-ranked US district,- in Manhattan, New York.
The US north-east has the highest overall ranking because people there earn more, are more highly-educated and have the second highest life expectancy.
West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama are four of the five bottom states on the index. Mississippi is ranked lowest.
This is our country as it is seen by the world. Wikipidia tells us the following:
According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not have a universal health care system. In the United States, around 84% of citizens have some form of health insurance; either through their employer (60%), purchased individually (9%), or provided by government programs (27%; there is some overlap in these figures). Certain publicly-funded health care programs help to provide for the elderly, disabled, children, veterans, and the poor, and federal law mandates public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay. U.S. government programs accounted for over 45% of health care expenditures, making the U.S. government the largest insurer in the nation. Per capita spending on health care by the U.S. government placed it among the top ten highest spenders among United Nations member countries in 2004.
Americans without health insurance coverage at some time during 2006 totaled about 16% of the population, or 47 million people. Health insurance costs are rising faster than wages or inflation, and "medical causes" were cited by about half of bankruptcy filers in the United States in 2001.
The debate about U.S. health care concerns questions of access, efficiency, and quality purchased by the high sums spent. The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000 ranked the U.S. health care system first in both responsiveness and expenditure, but 37th in overall performance and 72nd by overall level of health (among 191 member nations included in the study). The WHO study has been criticized both for its methodology and for a lack of correlation with user satisfaction ratings.The CIA World Factbook ranked the United States 41st in the world for lowest infant mortality rate and 45th for highest total life expectancy. A recent study found that between 1997 and 2003, preventable deaths declined more slowly in the United States than in 18 other industrialized nations. On the other hand, the National Health Interview Survey, released annually by the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics reported that approximately 66% of survey respondents said they were in "excellent" or "very good" health in 2006.
When Franz Fannon wrote The Wretched of the Earth about the psychological and material damage that the Algerians experienced under Colonial rule he described situations not unlike what we have inflicted upon ourselves. Jean Paul Sartre expanded on this and pointed out that French society was also suffering from the cost of inflicting these evils on the Algerians.
So now we play neocolonial games and have learned nothing from the hard lessons Europe learned during the colonial period. But it is worse. As science and technology reach heights never contemplated back then, we have a people who support a government that openly suppresses science. There is a malaise in this country that I experience every day. I have so called freedom of speech. I am a world recognized scientist. Yet if I dare open my mouth to criticise the American system with respect to science or health care I am quickly marginalized by the anti-intellectual countrymen I encounter every day.
We just finished hosting a pair of foreign students as part of a Lions Clubs International Youth Exchange. There were about 30 students here in our district and we met all of them when they had the "Parade of Nations" which was a chance for them to brag about their countries. I detected a strong feeling of well being among them and a certain pride in their countries. I can't help but wonder if part of that is a result of their own understanding of what is ailing the US. I get the feeling that the world has caught on. Not only does the Emporer not have any clothes, but his subjects are beginning to show the effects of his swindle. Wake up America before it is too late.