Why We're Liberals: A Political
Handbook for Post-Bush America
by Eric Alterman
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Liberals-Political-Post-Bush/dp/0670018600
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/
[Children and Health] With America's wasteful and expensive system of
public health, and family-unfriendly employment laws, its children
face a whole host of impediments to their development potential that
are all but unknown across much of Europe. The United States and South
Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not
provide health care for all of their citizens. Nationally, 29 percent
of children had no health insurance at some point in the last twelve
months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The United
States ranks eighty-fourth in the world for measles immunizations and
eighty-ninth for polio. These figures are particularly shocking given
that Americans spend almost two and half times the industrialized
world's median on health care, nearly a third of which is wasted on
bureaucracy and administration. As the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell
notes:
Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries.
We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We
get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other
Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our
counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower
than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United
States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the
nineteenth per-centile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform
more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than
in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have
more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan,
Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our
system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand
dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—
on healthcare-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada,
for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And,
of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all
its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we
spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any
insurance.
And remember the Finns? Not surprisingly, perhaps, they devote less
than half of what we do to medical care, as a percentage of GDP, and
yet their infant mortality rate is half that of the United States—and
one-sixth that of African-American babies—while their life expectancy
rate is greater. (The United States ranked forty-second, behind not
only Japan and most of Europe but also Jordan, Guam, and the Cayman
Islands, according to the most recent census figures.)
Perhaps all that education has made them smart enough to invest in
preventative care and universal coverage. Conservatives, members of
the American medical industrial complex, and other defenders of the
U.S. status quo frequently berate the European health care alternative
because, they say, the care that patients receive there is both less
responsive and less advanced than that available to Americans, however
much more we may have to pay for ours. These claims tend to evaporate
under even minimal scrutiny. Jonathan Cohn reports, for instance, that
American patients wait longer, on average, for routine treatments than
those in France and Germany. Moreover, hospitals in those two nations
also provide new mothers more than four days to recover, while
insurance companies insist that doctors send American mothers home
after only two. Swedes enjoy better success rates treating cervical
and ovarian cancers. The French best the American system when it comes
to stomach cancer, Hodgkin's disease, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The
French also benefit from more cancer radiation equipment than
Americans. And despite so many American boasts on exactly this topic,
Germans get the most hip replacements. In the area where one hears the
loudest cheers for the American system—making new cancer treatments
available to patients as quickly (however expensively) as possible,
the United States is merely tied with Austria, France, and
Switzerland. Of course, the U.S. system does not do everything poorly.
Cohn points to the world's highest cure rate for "some cancers—
including breast and prostate cancer," but it's hard to connect these
to our system of health care delivery. And finally, he rightfully
asks, if the less expensive, more efficient, and more universal
European system "means worse health care overall, then why do so many
studies show the U.S. scoring so poorly on international comparisons,
including those examining 'mortality amenable to health care'— a
statistic devised specifically to test the quality of different health
care systems across the globe?"
Just how did the Europeans get so smart? The education figures tell a
similar story. Although the United States devotes roughly the same
proportion of national income to education as the European Union
nations, on average, European nations all rank higher in math and
science. They also enjoy, on average, an additional year of education
and have a higher proportion of young people in higher education.
Why We're Liberals: A Political
Handbook for Post-Bush America
by Eric Alterman
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Liberals-Political-Post-Bush/dp/0670018600
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/
> Zinnic..
