by Upstream » Tue Aug 11, 2009 2:49 am
Не знаю как вы, а я так сильно удивился, что у Штатов официально имеются серьёзные проблемы в социальной сфере
We’re #1: Rating America’s Health
Is America #1? Maybe in basketball. The U.S. health care system ranked 37th on a list of 191 systems compiled by the World Health Organization in 2000. (France topped the list; most of Africa finished in the bottom third.) This doesn’t mean health care is bad in the United States. It just means that 36 other countries have it better, on average. This includes Japan, Canada, most of Western Europe, and part of the Middle East. The really nice thing about American medical care is its ability to treat diseases and injuries that no one else around the globe can. The United States has diagnostic technology and surgical skills unmatched in the world. U.S. doctors perform intricate transplants and radical new surgical procedures on the brain, eyes, and heart on a daily basis. The sick and wealthy from the five other continents often fly to the United States for such procedures. Likewise, Johns Hopkins Medical School Hospital in Baltimore is the best hospital in the United States and arguably in the world. The Harvard Medical School area in Boston hosts several world-class hospitals that are the envy of the international medical community. Philadelphia, too, is home to highly respectable hospitals, such as the Temple University system.
So why does the United States rank thirty-seventh in health care, nineteenth in life expectancy, and twentieth in infant mortality? The problem, it seems, is a lack of preventive medicine. Every other industrialized nation has close to 100 percent of its population enrolled in a health insurance program. The United States has about 60 percent insured. Also, the United States educates its public less about health (exercise, diet, sex) and provides fewer basic necessities for its citizens: food, shelter, vaccination, and family planning. Add to this the high number of homicides (30,000 annually, three times more than second-ranked Finland) and the highest teen pregnancy rate (twice as high as second-ranked Great Britain), and it is easy to see how the average person in America has it worse than the average person in other industrialized nations. Complicating issues is the fact that the United States has three distinct populations: the very wealthy, a somewhat insured middle class, and the poor. The poor are not just from the much-discussed inner city. Large tracts of the United States—from Native American reservations and the Appalachian Mountains to rural regions throughout America—have a health care infrastructure no better than that in many developing nations in Africa and Central America. So, when a Native American woman develops breast cancer, she usually dies. There are no regular breast exams. There are no clinics for biopsies. Cancer is detected late, and the chance for survival (which could have been 90 percent in a better setting) is minimal. People in other industrialized nations would never find themselves in this situation. For middle-class America, chances are much better but not superior to that of Europe and Japan. For the wealthiest in America—who are often well educated and have superior access to health care—the U.S. system is unparalleled. Among other low points, the United States ranks fifteenth in occupational deaths. An estimated six thousand workers are killed by accidents each year and some fifty thousand die annually from occupational diseases, according to the National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. The United States doesn’t do well by children, either. The country ranks first in child gun violence, first among industrialized nations in the number of preschool children not immunized, eleventh in the proportion of children living in poverty (one in five), and seventeenth in low-birthweight babies, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. Children under age fifteen are twelve times more likely to die from gunfire, sixteen times more likely to be murdered by a gun, eleven times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to be killed in a firearm accident than kids in twenty-five other industrialized nations combined. These sobering facts come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also, as of 2001, of the 154 members of the United Nations, only the United States and Somalia have yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The United States is #1 for a few things. In terms of health and the environment, the United States has the highest rate of beef and snack-food consumption and the highest rate of coronary bypasses; the highest rate of women who have had multiple abortions; the highest rate of HIV infection among industrialized countries; one of the worst ratios of doctors to patients and teachers to students; the highest rate of homelessness; the highest emission of air pollutants per capita; the heaviest garbage per capita; and the greatest disparity of wealth among industrialized countries. The good news is that improvement need not be difficult.
[Christopher Wanjek. Bad Medicine. Wiley, 2003]