FB Share
Email This Page
add comment

Street writes: "The study's findings are not well matched to the standard national narcissism of U.S. political discourse."

Health systems, health behaviors, social and economic conditions and physical environments were found to be behind the bad health experience in America. (photo: AFP)

Depressing Health Facts from Exceptional America

By Paul Street, ZNet

14 January 13


en years and three months ago, in a Senate speech in support of authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq if he wanted to, the right-wing U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) proclaimed the United States of America "the beacon to the world of the way life should be." Her statement expressed more brazenly than usual a widespread, doctrinally shared sentiment in the homilies of the nation's political class: the "exceptional," God-blessed USA is the best country in the world, the homeland and headquarters of freedom, prosperity, and good living.


I pose this query in the wake of the release last week of an authoritative study by some of the nation's leading medical and public health experts. Commissioned by the National Institute of Health, the federal government's top medical research agency, and carried out by experts appointed by the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM), two units of the prestigious National Academy of Science, the report provides the first comparative analysis of the burden imposed by multiple diseases and injuries in the United States and 16 other "affluent democracies: 13 Western European countries[1] plus Australia, Canada and Japan.

The study's findings are not well matched to the standard national narcissism of U.S. political discourse. On average, the NRC-IOM report shows, Americans experience higher rates of disease and injury and die sooner - yes, die sooner - than people in other high-income countries. The findings hold for "all ages between birth and 75" and even, the researchers found, "for...well-off Americans who mistakenly think that top-tier medical care ensures that they will remain in good health."

The NRC and IOM panel was "struck by the gravity of its findings. For many years," the panel noted, "Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high income countries. This disadvantage has been getting worse for three decades, especially among women. Not only are their lives shorter, but Americans also have a longstanding pattern of poorer health that is strikingly consistent and pervasive over the life course-at birth, during childhood and adolescence, for young and middle-aged adults, and for older adults."

"For decades," panel chairman Dr. Steven Woolf notes, "we [the United States] have been slipping behind."

How badly does the U.S. compare with its global peers? For male lifespan, the U.S. is dead last - 17 of 17. For female lifespan it is next to last.

The American disadvantage is especially pronounced in nine key health areas: infant mortality and low birth weight, injuries and homicides, adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, drug-related deaths, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and disability, "Many of these conditions," the panel notes, depressingly enough, "have a particularly profound effect on young people, reducing the odds that Americans will live to age 50. And for those who reach age 50, these conditions contribute to poorer health and greater illness later in life.

What's it all about? The NRC-IOM panel finds five factors behind the exceptionally bad (within the "advanced" rich nations) health experience of the United States' population:





All of these causes are highly important, of course, but if one is looking for a historical key as to why the U.S. has been "slipping behind the rest" of the advanced nations specifically over "the last three decades," then inequality would appear to be the biggest contributing factor. The comparative deterioration noted by the NRC and IOM panel is matched precisely to the rise of America's Second Gilded Age - the United States' distinctive and pronounced shift to remarkable socioeconomic inequality and plutocracy during the long "neoliberal" era from the late 1970s through the ongoing Age of Obama. Along with rampant, savage disparity - so great now that the richest 400 Americans now possess a greater net worth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans - comes rampant, health-wrecking stress and insecurity for untold tens of millions of everyday Americans, including many that might seem comfortably placed but who are in fact vulnerable to stunning downward mobility and even destitution in a nation that combines epic taxpayer bailouts and subsidies for its very wealthy Few with the weakest social safety net in the "advanced" world.

Do not look for the NRC-IOM findings to receive much if any attention in avowed American exceptionalist Barack Obama's forthcoming Second Inaugural and State of the Union Addresses. The depressing facts do not fit well with the president's longstanding and persistently cozy relationship with the nation's economic super-elite (notwithstanding many Wall Street financiers' defection to Romney in 2012), with his repeated references across his national political career to the United States' so-called "free market" system as "our greatest asset" and the source of "the greatest prosperity the world has ever seen," with his neoliberal commitment to "deficit reduction," with his repeated campaign boasts about cutting federal domestic discretionary spending to its lowest level since the Eisenhower years (consistent with his recent reference to his domestic policies as consistent with those advanced by "liberal Republicans" in past years), or with the limited and conservative nature of his anti-public health care reform, aptly described by the progressive journalist and author Matt Taibbi as "a massive giveaway to private, profit-making corporations."

For what its worth, Obama has never been terribly interested in how the U.S. stacks up against its true global peers when it came to public and social health. The president's bestselling campaign book The Audacity of Hope waxed eloquent on "just how good" even "our poor...have it" compared to more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America. Obama revealingly ignored considerably less favorable contrasts with Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, the most relevant comparisons, where dominant norms and social policies created considerable slighter levels of poverty and inequality (and longer and healthier lives, we might add, in light of the NRC and IOM's report) than what is found in the militantly hierarchical U.S. Given his desire to raise money and win approval from the top 1 percent that owned more than half the United States' financial wealth, it made sense that he preferred to compare the U.S. poor with the desperately impoverished masses of Nairobi, Jakarta and Bogota than with the relatively well-off lower classes of Oslo, Paris and Toronto.

In the summer of 1966, by contrast, Obma's supposed role model Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was most struck by the greater poverty that existed in the U.S compared to its real global peers: other First World states. "Maybe something is wrong with our economic system," King told an interviewer and observing that (in historian David Garrow's words) "in democratic socialist societies such as Sweden there was no poverty, no unemployment and no slums."

A generation later and for some time now, it is clear that Swedes and other Europeans, along with Australians, Canadians, and Japanese, experience not just less poverty but also and by no mere coincidence longer and healthier lives than do residents of "the beacon to the world of the way life should be." That's something for America's purportedly patriotic politicians, plutocrats, presidents, and pundits to put in their exceptionalist pipes to puff on.

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner




Remember that making the world better begins with responsible action.

- The RSN Team

+24 # hd70642 2013-01-14 11:19
As a person of poverty I am too aware of how poorly the impoverished are portrayed in the corporate media . Adults that reside with their parents due to low and insecure income are never asked what is your educational level marketable skills and weekly income. Instead the media personality disorders simply assume they are immature and irresponsible and that housing is affordable
+20 # reiverpacific 2013-01-14 11:25
"----"just how good" even "our poor...have it" compared to more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America--"[Quot e from article].
In fact as a large part of Latin America pulls away from decades of US domination, this is becoming obsolete as Universal healthcare is now a fact of life in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil and all but the few who have continued to hew to the US capitalist model And the despised Cuba always has. South Korea likewise has this basic human right -I have a good fried who just moved back to there for just this reason and who like me, doesn't want to grow old in a country that is going backward in this respect as in so many other basic social necessities for "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (sic).
I mean, how can you live such a life if you are shit-scared to go to the doctor, dentist or any other for-profit health care provider for which you are likely to be bankrupted, even with insurance as I was.
Yet I've heard several Rethug' congress critters and senators stand up in the halls of power and declare with straight faces that "We have the best heath care in the world" -which is not true even if you have top of the line insurance as they do.
And this is just one aspect of the veil created between the American exceptionalists and reality, the owner-media and the sheeple who believe them in their head -in -sand lives.
You can shop 'til you drop here but if you drop, you're screwed.
+15 # juliajayne 2013-01-14 11:29
My senator, Mrs. Hutchinson, has always been a bit of a Calvinist, believing that rich people (and apparently countries) are morally superior. It's an unfortunate stance given the stats as compared to other rich countries. Then again, inside the bubble, magical thinking IS a truly exceptional value (sic) in this woman's America.;-)
+6 # HahliHohli 2013-01-14 12:09
WOW, really made my day! Hopefully it is darkest before the the Dawn.
0 # mikeandnettie 2013-01-17 08:41
Only if there is a dawn. Otherwise, it just stays dark.
+9 # Scott479 2013-01-14 12:14
The future's not any better when we look at the gap between what could've been and what is under Obama. Yes, he inherited a mess of a size and scope only a colossal fool could have produced and, no, he did not cash in the nationwide political capital we gave him in voting through a genuine mandate to undo the damages done by the colossal fool. The squandered political capital sits unused in Jamie Dimon's and Lloyd Blankfein's banks and pays them unearned interest drawn directly from tithing members of the cult of personality .
+16 # moby doug 2013-01-14 12:59
America spends more on healthcare than any other nation, but that money ends up in the hands of profiteerng middlemen like HMO CEO's and their K-Street lobbyists. Medicine-for-pr ofit is a disastrously wasteful, fantastically inefficient, system of healthcare delivery. As for Sen Hutchison, she has been an oil-whore for her entire political career. She only speaks for the rich SOB's who own her. She's retiring soon and good riddance to bad rubbish. May she rot in liars' & hypocrites' hell.
+6 # mdhome 2013-01-14 17:52
Ah, yes, the money is not going to health care, but instead to the lobbyists and the insurance CEOs and may I say congressmen for their campaigns. There is no reason with the money spent that we can not have better results, but that will only come when the "health" insurance companies are dead and buried.
+11 # grouchy 2013-01-14 13:09
And shouldn't the factors listed above, health and education, be at the TOP of our list on which to spend our money on? To hell with most of the others we choose today, especially our colonial military!
+5 # Dr Binky 2013-01-14 14:02
infant mortality and low birth weight, injuries and homicides, adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, drug-related deaths, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and disability. This list appears to have far more to do with social problems than medical problems. Most of our infant mortality comes from lo birth weight babies which come mostly from teen pregnancy in low income families. The two leading causes of death in young americans is car crashes and homicide which are not caused by poor health care. Certainly STD and HIV are not caused by poor health care. Diabetes and early heart disease are mostly associated with obesity and not caused by poor health care. Chronic lung disease is caused mostly by smoking, not poor health care. Social conditions and poor health choices certainly lead to early disease and poor outcomes.
There is plenty wrong with our healthcare system but it has more to do with over-treatment for profit than under-treatment . this paper is not a measure of our healthcare problems but a measure of our social problems.
+8 # Rita Walpole Ague 2013-01-14 14:35
Kudos, Paul Street, for your so educating, truth filled article.

I'll never forget the laughter coming from the undersecretary of the Swedish embassy in D.C., and his dear wife, when they asked if I was related to then V.P. Agnew, a decent question with my married name being Ague. When I answered "God, no!" and pretended to throw up, they laughed and said I and my family were the ones they wanted to rent their D.C. home for the summer. Rent it we did, and read I did, in their library, of what Sweden did then and does now to provide for all its citizens, including the poorest of the poor and sickest of the sick.

Truth we need, and lots of it, to ever swing the pendulum away from the U.S. takeover (coup d'etat) by the evil villainaire rulers, and create any real McCoy liberty and justice for all.
+9 # Rick Levy 2013-01-14 20:46
The flu epidemic in America is rampant partly because so many workers, unlike in civilized countries, lack sick pay and can't afford to miss work or are afraid of losing their jobs for taking time off, no matter how desperately needed. So they come to work when sick and spread their illnesses to others. How economically shortsighted is THAT for the U.S. economy?
+3 # davehaze 2013-01-14 22:12
Outlaw advertising food products to children. They are too young to realize that they are being manipulated and lied to big time. Thus they demand only sweet and fat and salt food.

Take away farm subsidies to wheat, corn, soy, and sugar human and animal feed, and instead only subsidize organic vegetables. Get rid of water and soil polluting pesticides and hormones and for god's sake ban those deadly antihuman GMOs.

But it's not going to happen as long as the Democrats and Republicans control us.

Get healthy support third parties.
