[lit-ideas] Re: Guess where the USA ranks in terms of health care

John McCreery wrote
No question but what a majority of Americans want universal health care. The immediate stimulus for my remark was a young couple I know, anthropologists and U.S. citizens who live and work in Denmark. The husband told me that on recent trips back to the USA, they were struck by how much like a third-world country it was, with a visible and growing disparity between the well-off and the working or non-working poor. They were talking, I believe, about Missouri.
As an anthropologist yourself, and as a perceptive observer, in any event, you must know that (a) Missouri is not the world (b) casual observation (of what it is not exactly clear) in one geographical area in a country the size of the US, on the part of two visitors, who apparently were not engaged in any quantifiable sorting and grading, is unlikely to yield any sort of reliable generalization about the country as a whole.
That there are stark and heartbreaking differences in income, wellbeing, and living conditions between rich and poor in this country is not news. A visit to Detroit fifty years ago would have illuminated them, for in the blocks between the glass and steel towers was the wasteland of the poor, not hidden in a ‘poor’ neighborhood, but lying at very foot of the towers, as if dumped like garbage from the heights. Baltimore? Philadelphia? St. Louis? Los Angeles? Washington DC? Parts of them are hell on earth. Many people in the US never see them; many aren’t really aware of them; many don’t even want to hear about it.
Is this so different, really, from the gap between Frenchmen of pur sang, and those who live in the Islamic communities on the fringes of Paris, where there is massive unemployment, savage crime, inadequate housing, and bad schools? 

What is the topic here, after all?
There is one suicide in Japan (roughly) every 15 minutes. Japan’s population is half that of the US's, but the two have the same number of suicides annually (plus or minus a few hundred either way). Part of the increase in the Japanese suicide rate—it jumped markedly in 1998—has been attributed to ‘bullying at school.’ Whether or not this is true or just a wild guess by a frantic bureaucrat, I don’t know. In 2003, the first cases of ‘netto shinju,’ online suicide pacts among strangers were reported. 

http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2008/Matthews.html

and

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/24/japan.mentalhealth
Do I have anything useful to say? Probably not, except that this isn’t about motes and beams, nor is it any kind of ‘defense’ of the motley of schemes and practices that make up the ‘US healthcare system.’ It’s more or less an expression of amazement at the subtext of Schadenfreude (Judy’s remarks have none of this) expressed by several people about the superiority of their healthcare ‘systems’ to ours, a superiority that I’m sure every US listmember would acknowledge in whole or in part. 

Robert Paul
The Reed Institute



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