| SlorgNet said: The American people are fine, it's our political and economic system which is fundamentally broken. How broken? Let us count the ways... 2. Broken health care system - the rich get treatment, the poor die. The US has some of the worst infant mortality and life expectancy indexes of any industrial country - people in Canada live 2 years longer on average than we do. Millions go bankrupt paying medical bills, unlike Canada, Japan or the EU. The US system is stupefyingly expensive - 15% of GDP, far more than Germany (8% GDP). The cost doesn't give us better care, it's waste, drained away by a parasitic insurance and pharmaceutical industry. |
I'm going to have to argue with this, sorry. The U.S. defines infant mortality differently than many countries, so our I.M. rate is higher than many of those other nations. As for life expectancy, you could actually do a lot worse. Hell, according to Wikipedia, the U.S. life expectancy is actually even higher than Denmark. And given this excerpt, I find that a bit surprising:
"Denmark, with a free market capitalist economy, and a large welfare state,[3] ranks according to one measure as having the world's highest level of income equality. From 2006 to 2008, surveys[4] ranked Denmark as "the happiest place in the world," based on standards of health, welfare, and education. The 2008 Global Peace Index survey ranks Denmark as the second most peaceful country in the world, after Iceland.[5] Denmark was also ranked as the least corrupt country in the world in the 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index,[6] sharing a top position with Sweden and New Zealand."
A lot of it is culture. Canada shares many of the same bad habits as we do, but they have a lower population and less poor (resulting in slightly higher life expectancies). The reason many countries in Europe and countries such as Japan have high life expectancies is because they don't have diets based around fast food and sugary cereal and soda. They don't have nearly as many overweight and obese citizens as the U.S.
But I do agree that health care in the country sucks.
