As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined. The United States does little better in international comparisons of mortality. Americans live 5.7 fewer years of "perfect health" -- a measure adjusted for time spent ill -- than the Japanese. Meanwhile, per capita health spending in the United States increased at nearly twice the rate in other wealthy nations between 1970 and 2002. As a result, the United States now spends well over twice the median expenditure of industrialized nations on health care, and far more than any other country as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP).
Free Market Fundamentalism literally kills.
2 comments:
This is a complex issue and there are many reasons -- such as lifestyle factors -- why Americans score low on health indicators. The private vs public issue is not a significant factor. Health care reform won't make people healthier.
If anything, I would argue that the market "kills" by pricing junk food so cheap.
From the abstract to the piece at the end of the link:
"Many advocates of US health reform point to the nation’s relatively low life-expectancy rankings as evidence that the health care system is performing poorly. Others say that poor US health outcomes are largely due not to health care but to high rates of smoking, obesity, traffic fatalities, and homicides. We used cross-national data on the fifteen-year survival of men and women over three decades to examine the validity of these arguments. We found that the risk profiles of Americans generally improved relative to those for citizens of many other nations, but Americans’ relative fifteen-year survival has nevertheless been declining. For example, by 2005, fifteen-year survival rates for forty-five-year-old US white women were lower than in twelve comparison countries with populations of at least seven million and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of at least 60 percent of US per capita GDP in 1975. The findings undercut critics who might argue that the US health care system is not in need of major changes."
Whatever the complexities, the ongoing role of know nothing right wing bullshit about socialized medicine keeping the US from implementing more equitable and cost effective healthcare is undeniable and well worth highlighting.
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