While the progress toward a civilised single-payer universal system is painfully slow and hobbled every step of the way by the big insurance companies, there’s still been progress.
Yes, Obama’s ACA is half-baked but it was still progress that would have been unthinkable even four years earlier. Also, California keeps putting forward bills for a statewide health plan. They haven’t gotten it passed into law yet, but when (not if) they do other states will either follow or become de-populated.
The Know-Nothing 27% will continue to be bamboozled and elect representatives who jump straight into the pockets of the big private insurers. Eventually, though, a good portion of them will get sick and find out, as 70%+ of Americans already have, that there is a better way.
The sickest part about that is that it THEN appears that if you removed black people from the data, that’d bump the US average back up to match the other countries. Which means that the treatment of POC is probably insanely worse than anticipated.
Emphasis on “within my lifetime”. I do believe that eventually it’s possible, but I’m getting older and sooner or later I’m bound to have a serious health issue. It won’t be long before living in a country with a severely fucked-up healthcare system may cost me my life, or at least leave me absolutely destitute. I’m not even confident that the USA will be around long enough for the Know-Nothing Americans to finally wake up, so I’m not eager to be a martyr for this cause when I could move to another country that figured out healthcare decades ago. The USA is not special. There are smarter, saner, better countries that have actual real issues to work on without the additional burden of manufactured ones, and that’s where I’d rather be and what I’d rather be contributing to.
Oh no, it’s worse than that. That 78.mumble life expectancy? That is for white people.
The lower life expectancies for Black and Native American people is balanced by a higher life expectancy for Asians and Latinos.
A study by Jack M. Guralnik, Kenneth C. Land, Dan Blazer, Gerda G. Fillenbaum, and Laurence G. Branch found that education had a substantially stronger relation to total life expectancy and active life expectancy than did race. Still, sixty-five-year-old black men had a lower total life expectancy (11.4 years) and active life expectancy (10 years) than white men (total life expectancy, 12.6 years; active life expectancy, 11.2 years) The differences were reduced when the data were controlled for education.
According to that analysis, it’s not because black people are denied health care so much as it’s because black people are systematically kept uneducated, and uneducated people tend to be poor, and poor people are denied health care. (And also education: wash, rinse, repeat.)
Which is to say, black people are denied health care, because health care is a subset of “equitable access to the rights and privileges of citizenship”.
I try to not think of the shareholders. Though here in Australia with the Superannuation Guarantee we are all shareholders at least indirectly through our Super Funds.
Yes. The margins between sane and insane voter choices have often been razor thin, and sanity can prevail. Those who are ardently anti-vaxx will eventually have less influence at the ballot box, because, no matter what Fox says, the dead don’t vote in big enough numbers to effect elections.
I’ve roots and folk here, so I’d likely stay, but I would never question someone who wants/needs to leave for a saner country. In that vein, should this place become less sane, can we stay on your couch?
The last elections were all insanely close statistically across many areas. Lots of purple looking stuff. We know that statistically more republican voters have died. It will be interesting to see how the death rate difference vs the margin of victory compare with the next election. Just getting more people to vote is always important and has a direct impact on election outcomes. That will likely be even more important this year, even for very small boosts.
We may see death rate vs election margin vs voter turn out create some surprising outcomes in November. Or, we might not, it’s possible the largest impact differences from death rate are in areas where the margin was large.
If that impact creates changes, it’ll be sad that that was what was required.
It’s so frustrating to me because so many of the people who think any kind of improvement in US healthcare is communism and evil are the same ones crying about the decline in population and an aging population. Do they just not understand that if we don’t take better care of our living people now we will just have a smaller aging population because more people died younger?
Present the Know-Nothing 27% with a single -payer universal system that’s only available to white English-speaking citizens and that excludes coverage for abortions and birth control and they’d accept that “socialism” (effectively adding in the “National”) in a second.
They are also the same ones who want the President to force oil companies to produce more oil because they can’t afford gas. Or do something about grocery prices.
So, they embrace what they believe to be communism for cheaper gas and groceries but not for affordable health care.
Ah, so you have data showing the US is worse in all these measures than other similar nations like Canada, the UK, France, etc? Go ahead and fetch it. I’ll wait.
As a Canadian living in the US for a long time, my experience with this was that most Americans like the system. It’s a sort of Stockholm syndrome where they don’t realize how much better it could be because this is all they know. Just last week I shocked some former coworkers when I said my doctors’ office has no credit card machines and it was really weird for me to see that in the US. They asked “well how do you pay for the doctor?”. To which, of course, I said, “I don’t. You just leave”. I still don’t think they really believed me.
Much like US conservatives have given up on the idea that any good governance is possible, most Americans I talk to don’t believe healthcare can be good.
Of course, this essentially already exists in the form of Medicare.
I always thought the low-friction route to universal healthcare in the US was simply to gradually lower the qualification age for Medicare. Drop it to 55 right now, then 50 in another few years, and so on. In 20 years you’d have a proper healthcare system. By all accounts, Medicare is a good system that works really well for everyone on it, so just gradually let more people in. No giant earth-shaking reform bills required.
Thank you for this insight. Man, for a moment it really looked like we might have to face up to some sort of systemic problem, glad we can keep shrugging that off.
