What? European style socialist healthcare is better than the healthcare we receive in the greatest nation on earth? Well yes, yes it is. Even their rich people are healthier than our rich people, according to a study conducted by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine entitled “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.”

Some details were surprising: even wealthier Americans and those with health insurance were not as healthy as counterparts in other prosperous nations, it found.

“We were struck by the gravity of these findings,” said Steven Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and chair of the panel that wrote the report. […]

The report is the first of its kind to look at a range of illnesses, injuries and behaviors of people of all ages in the United States to run a comparison with counterparts in rich countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan and several countries in western Europe.

Among the countries studied, the United States was in last place or close to last in nine key benchmark areas.

They were: infant mortality and low birth weight; injuries and homicides; teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections; prevalence of HIV and AIDS; drug-related deaths; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; chronic lung disease; and disability.

Something is terribly wrong in this country and has been for some time when it comes to the health and well being of our people (other than those corporate persons who get to spend as much as they want to influence our elections and the laws Congress considers). We came out of WWII and developed the most prosperous, best educated, healthiest nation on earth. But that was over sixty years ago.

Today, among our peers in the developed world, we rank as the unhealthiest nation. Coincidentally, we have the greatest income inequality in our history. During the good old days – back when “union” was not a dirty word and teachers were paid a living wage – we dramatically reduced income inequality to the lowest point in our history.

Then came Reagan, deregulation, privatization, and the rise of the for profit health care industry. Now we spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, and we get worse health care than our neighbor to the North, and the nations we defeated in WWII, Japan and Germany, among others. As the author of the panel that issued this report stated, this level of suffering is unnecessary. You know, when people take medical vacations to get dental care and other medical treatments in Mexico and Costa Rica because they can’t afford the cost of those services in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” – well, need I say more.

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