Excuse me but where did that "ignorance is bliss" come from? The poster asked for some information, I tried to provide it. Did I belittled American's achievements? No. Did I provide wrong data? No. So maybe I am not being ignorant as just naive. There was very little opinion in my comment. Anyway...
Life expectancy may be low because people eat crappy food, but the eat crappy food because they are cheap. Sure it costs money for countries in the EU to push people towards better diet and you may object to that as a socialist government. But why should health care be only measured in terms of cures rather than prevention? I'd say both are important.
Second point. I perfectly agree with you, on the Gini coefficient and on other point. In EU countries there is a smaller gap. If you look at averages (what the original poster was talking about) the very skewed American distribution matters.
The USA has an excellent health care... if you can pay for it. It has an excellent education system... if you can pay for it. You can take plenty of holidays... if you don't need the extra money. And so on.
But the number of people that can afford those in the USA is so small that when you look at the average, most are worse off.
Do you not want to have wealth redistribution? Fine, don't. I don't live in the USA so it doesn't affect me. At your election vote whatever you prefer. But the article linked here was suggesting a different view of what may be a better balance. You like your way of living: suit yourself. shrug
"Excuse me but where did that "ignorance is bliss" come from?"
People that don't have freedom and are stuck in one system don't know what they are missing.
"But the number of people that can afford those in the USA is so small that when you look at the average, most are worse off."
The majority of people (last I heard it was > 70%) have some form of health care in the US. Our health care system does need to be reformed, but to say the majority of the population has no health care is just wrong.
What makes you think that I don't have freedom? Or that I am stuck in my current system?
In how many countries have you lived in?
Having some form of health care is not the same as having good health care, and most definitely not the same as having the best health care that the USA provides.In fact, I am puzzled how you can quote a statistics like that with a straight face: you are saying that less than 30% of the population doesn't have any form of health care! That's A LOT!!!
which quotes around 15% of the population WITHOUT insurance. And to those you may need to add all those whose insurances don't cover everything you may have.
If you look in more detail, it's not as big a problem as it appears.
14 million are de-facto insured - they are eligible for medicaid but have not bothered to sign up. If they ever require insurance, they can sign up and medicaid will pay for their treatment (medicaid doesn't care about preexisting conditions). Another 23 million are uninsured for 4 months or less, presumably because they declined COBRA.
Fun fact, from the wikipedia page: the states with the biggest percentage of uninsured people border Mexico. I wonder how much of the problem could be solved by enforcing immigration law.
Life expectancy may be low because people eat crappy food, but the eat crappy food because they are cheap. Sure it costs money for countries in the EU to push people towards better diet and you may object to that as a socialist government. But why should health care be only measured in terms of cures rather than prevention? I'd say both are important.
Second point. I perfectly agree with you, on the Gini coefficient and on other point. In EU countries there is a smaller gap. If you look at averages (what the original poster was talking about) the very skewed American distribution matters.
The USA has an excellent health care... if you can pay for it. It has an excellent education system... if you can pay for it. You can take plenty of holidays... if you don't need the extra money. And so on.
But the number of people that can afford those in the USA is so small that when you look at the average, most are worse off.
Do you not want to have wealth redistribution? Fine, don't. I don't live in the USA so it doesn't affect me. At your election vote whatever you prefer. But the article linked here was suggesting a different view of what may be a better balance. You like your way of living: suit yourself. shrug