A lot of reactionary claptrap is being slung around to defeat President Obama’s health care reforms; especially deceptive statistics regarding health care in Canada and Europe.
In a column from June on “Patriotism” I wrote: “If you dare question any of their (conservatives’) apple pie delusions of America — ‘greatest country in the history of the world,’ ‘fountainhead of liberty and freedom,’ ‘apex of Western civilization’ with actual facts, statistics and comparisons, you are a labeled a ‘hater of America!’” But if you take the infatuation, emotion and sentimentality out of the equation, and, in fact really loved America, you’d want to do something about the following.
Across the board, in healthcare, medical research, business climate, foreign help, education, working conditions, economic justice and military adventurism, the numbers paint a different picture.
The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without universal health care. (Germany’s dates to 1883). Ironically, according to the Kaiser Family foundation, Americans pay an average of nearly $7000 per year for health care compared to less than $3000 in other industrial nations and yet America is ranked 50th in life expectancy by the 2009 CIA World Factbook. (Powerful maligned France and Canada that conservatives love to point to as “failed socialized medicine” near in eighth and ninth.)
In 2000 the World Health Organization ranked our health system 37th overall and 43rd in infant mortality just beating out Croatia. The prestigious Commonwealth Fund reaffirmed the US has the world’s costliest health care, largely due to $156 billion in annual administrative costs, executive salaries, prescription costs, the dramatic increase since 1970 in for-profit hospitals and grand corporate profits, yet ranks last among the Group of Eight in preventable mortality. According to a RAND Corporation study, Americans ages 55 to 64 are twice as likely as Brits to suffer such diseases as diabetes, lung cancer and high blood pressure, while heart attacks and strokes are significantly higher, as well. And a Harvard University scrutinize found Americans 42 percent more likely than Canadians to have diabetes; 32 percent more likely high blood pressure and 12 percent more likely arthritis.
And, you know all that crap about the high cost of research and equipment the HMOs, Big Pharma and hi-tech biomed firms feed you? Reality is the U.S. ranks only fifth in necessary cancer research and medical breakthroughs.
Well, okay so our health care sucks. But what about all those other wonders of the American Century?
Like the American lifestyle? Homes, cars, recreation, college educations; every luxury the mind can imagine. Err, well not for the 100 million of us that live below or close to the poverty line — and that was before the current economic seizure — but hell the “imagine” thing still applies. But hey, for the other two-thirds of us, consuming a quarter of the earth’s resources and being the planet’s largest polluter is no small accomplishment for only a sixth of the world’s population just beating out Myanmar at 45th on the World Environmental Sustainability Index.
Well how about the country’s ample natural beauty, wonderful vistas and dazzling seashores — that the mining, oil, scurry, grazing and developer interests are reimbursing taxpayers a smidgen to exploit? The Himalayas are higher; Cooper Canyon is deeper; the Riviera more aesthetic. Get over yourself!
“Special” sure can’t be because of our exceptional social service, healthcare and education policies. The UN Human Development Index which rates livability on quality of life, life expectancy, education, healthcare, etc. — and not impartial on economic factors — puts the U.S. in fifteenth spot slack even Iceland. Brrrrrr. That’s just wearisome hurtful.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently placed American students 24th out of 29 industrialized nations in math and problem solving, 15th out of 29 in reading comprehension, 14th out of 16 in high school graduation and fourth in college graduation rates.
At every performance marker, from high school math and science achievement tests and college graduates’ literacy rates to patents issued, publication in research journals and the number of advanced science and engineering degrees awarded annually (China and India are together granting one million to our 80,000), America’s so-called technological superiority is failing or slipping badly.
Okay then, it has to be that democracy thing. But are we really more free than say the Dutch? Or the Aussies? Or the Costa Ricans? U.S. voter turnout is 139th in the world, and, according to the CIA World Factbook, our politics are tied for 17th in the level of political corruption.
Yeah but Americans are the most generous (i.e. charitable) people in the world donating millions of dollars in foreign abet during disasters. In reality, the U.S. ranks 14th in private and governmental foreign aid per capita and ranks last among the world’s 22 richest nations in the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) it provides in financial assistance to developing countries. So much for America’s vaunted goodwill.
And according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, only a minority of the citizens of our mature allies hold a favorable opinion of the U.S. with even China having a more positive image among Europeans than America.
Let me tell you no one else does international intimidation like America! What’s not to adore about a country that spends $500 billion on its military, more than the next 22 countries combined and 25 times as worthy as its five “likeliest” enemies, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan and Cuba (Cuba??? ).
In a unique book, a former New York Times bureau chief, Stephen Kinzer details 14 instances where the U.S. “has played the decisive role in disposing regimes…that displeased (it) for various ideological, political and economic reasons” in the last 115 years. They run from Hawaii in 1893 through Guatemala (1952), Iran (1953), Chile (1973) — often with the connivance of American multinationals like, respectively, United Fruit, Anglo-Iranian Oil and ITT. Other researchers would expand the list threefold by including those countries in which the U.S. role was significantly destabilizing but not the deciding factor such as in the failed 2002 coup in Venezuela.
Well, there’s got to be something that makes America special. Why else would all those immigrants have been coming here for 400 years? (Oh, and by the blueprint treating the original inhabitants a tad shabbily, wouldn’t you say? )
Overwhelmingly, it not the well-to-do who have been gracing our shores; the rich and powerful are doing quite well and loving right where the are, thank you. America’s immigrants are the economic and political misfits of the world, my ancestors among them — you know “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” — who are thrilled to get jobs and opportunities anywhere, and if nothing else can be said about America, its economic engine has been stoked for centuries.
Oh yeah. On that opportunity thingy. Sorry, but according to a unique stare, the chance of a person moving from the bottom half of the U.S. economic ladder to the top half is about one percent. Not precisely Horatio Alger proportions
However, there is one group of American workers who fair far better than their counterparts in other industrialized countries. CEO compensation in America has exploded in the past twenty years to an improper 450 times that of blue collar workers, and eight times that of CEOs in Europe and Japan, who seem to get by very nicely with reasonable rates about 50 times that of their workers. The huge compensation packages — most of which are deductible from corporate taxes — are proportionally reflected in similarly distorted rewards throughout the upper strata of American corporations. In the last 25 years, the household income of highest quintile has increased 55 percent while growing less than five percent for the lowest quintile, less than inflation and in spite of worker productivity increasing nearly 15 percent between 2001 and 2008.
Meanwhile while the Fat Cats are raking it in, The Economist magazine downgraded the U.S. from first to fifth among the best countries in which to do business. And clearly not because of dreaded government meddling or union prerogatives; “Socialist” Canada, Netherlands and Finland are 1, 2 and 3. And among the Group of Seven (excludes Russia) industrialized nations, American workers work longer hours and receive the fewest benefits and least vacation days by 12 to 29 days; just a third of those received by Italians, Germans and the French; half of what the Brits and Japanese get.
Oh yeah, that #92 thing. That’s America’s area on the World Bank’s Gini Index which measures inequality between rich and poor citizens based upon the percentage of income equality the richest and poorest quintiles receive. The U.S. Gini or coefficient is 45.0, in the company of Uganda and Uruguay, with the richest fifth getting 52.2% and the poorest fifth getting 3.1%. Sweden and Denmark are first and second with 23 and 24 on the Gini scale. The other 95 nations with a record of greater social and economic justice than the U.S. include Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and all of Europe as well as Canada and Japan.
So let’s see, in comparison to other industrialized nations, Americans get the short end of the stick in education, health care, social services, workers’ benefits, economic and social justice and lifestyle and environmental quality. America is stingy when it comes to foreign aid; significantly failing slow in research production, business climate and economic opportunities; and widely disliked and mistrusted.
So what our “uniqueness” comes down to is pretty much our supremacy at corporate marketing and personal consumption, pollution, military intimidation and political and economic imperialism.
The essential ability of an advanced civilization is to enrich people’s lives beyond survival mode — greater access to knowledge, better nutrition and health services, more glean livelihoods, security against crime, corruption and physical violence, satisfying leisure hours, political and cultural freedoms and sense of participation in community. Such a society ought to be exploiting its wealth to enable it to travel toward those objectives for all its people instead of remaining mired in 18th century mercantilism that rewards only the rich and powerful.
Only when America learns that lesson can it truly be called the “greatest nation on earth.”
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