As I have noted repeatedly, the United States is the only developed nation on earth that does not provide universal healthcare as a basic right. Some blame costs. After WWII, when most of the developed world was hovering with economic brinkmanship to recover from war damage, the American economy took its WWII manufacturing capacity into consumer products. American soldiers were getting education through the GI Bill, and benefits to fund returning veterans’ ability to buy house exploded the economy. Unions added pricey healthcare packages as the new normal, and every aspect of the healthcare industry – from doctors and nurses to prescription costs – reflected what quickly became the most expensive healthcare system, by far, on earth.
With costs still under control under the crush of rebuilding bombed out cities and infrastructure, the rest of the world began implement universal healthcare programs (mostly in the 1960s and beyond). But they has a much lower cost threshold to cover. In the United States, now obsessing with the rising of communism and socialism, anything that contained the word “social” became our enemy, as evidence of so-called “creeping socialism.” Even public education, Social Security and Medicare benefits – nominally “social” programs but hardly the government ownership of all values that defined “socialism” – were increasingly conflated with the “S” word. When Republican President Richard Nixon even suggested that we should have national healthcare in the 1960s, his party shut him down.
To make matters worse, racial undercurrents in the era of civil rights and voting rights conflicts crept into the battle. In universal healthcare, opponents argued, Black and White people would be mixed in integrated hospitals, perhaps even sharing blood where transfusions were given. They preferred to hide behind the mantra of “creeping socialism,” but racism was a clear motivator against a national healthcare program. Even in recent decades as we exported jobs over healthcare costs – Detroit moved car manufacturing to nearby Ontario, Canada for the primary reason of avoid the roughly $1,500 to $2,000 per vehicle by reason of union healthcare – the US government did nothing.
By the late 1980s, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the world began to catch up and then pass the productivity values that had allowed the United States to dominate global economics. Furthermore, with their infrastructure decimated by the war, overseas interests were now building state-of-the-art manufacturing capacity, so clearly evidenced in the manufacturing of steel and aluminum; the United State was still deploying old plants and processes. Education levels, particularly in developed countries, now matched and began to exceed ours. As our government invoked failed economic theories (“a rising tide floats all boats,” which never happened), we preferred cutting taxes for the rich in lieu of upgrading our fading infrastructure… incurring both unsustainable trade deficits and a huge federal deficit that was funded by massive international borrowing. That federal deficit sits at over $31 trillion today.
This incredible shift in resource allocation and priorities is now reflected in alarming statistics. As rich elements in society traded supporting conspiracy theories and religious extremism for cuts in high-rate taxes and costly regulatory compliance, most of the developed world, particularly the most successful economies. moved the other way.
In this April 5th OpEd for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik, examines the most startling metrics of our failed policies – life expectancy, well beyond the “COVID” explanation. “Years of widening economic inequality, compounded by the pandemic and political storm and stress, have given Americans the impression that the country is on the wrong track. Now there’s empirical data to show just how far the country has run off the rails: Life expectancies have been falling.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that life expectancy at birth fell in 2021 to its lowest level since 1996, a decline of nearly a year on average from 2020. That was after a decline by 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, producing the worst two-year decline since 1921-23… These figures open a window on a set of pathologies unique to America among developed countries… The U.S. suffered a greater rise in mortality and premature deaths than its peer countries during the pandemic years of 2019-21, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Family Foundation Health System Tracker.
“‘COVID-19 has erased two decades of life expectancy growth in the U.S., whereas the average life expectancy for comparable countries has decreased only marginally, to 2018 levels,’ the Health System Tracker found… That may not be surprising. Few developed countries other than the U.S. turned COVID and anti-pandemic options into political issues, converting such proven treatments as vaccines into partisan litmus tests.
“But COVID is far from the only explanation for America’s dismal trend line. The pandemic accounted for about half the decline in life expectancy, according to the CDC. ‘Unintentional injuries,’ a category that includes drug overdoses, contributed an additional 16%, followed by heart disease (4.1%), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3%) and suicide (2.1%)… Those factors haven’t occurred in a vacuum. They’re connected to what the CDC called ‘the social determinants of health’ — ‘economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, racism, climate change and political systems.’
“Americans with the shortest life expectancies ‘tend to have the most poverty, face the most food insecurity, and have less or no access to healthcare,’ Robert H. Shmerling of Harvard Medical School wrote in October. ‘Additionally, groups with lower life expectancy tend to have higher-risk jobs that can’t be performed virtually, live in more crowded settings, and have less access to vaccination, which increases the risk of becoming sick with or dying of COVID-19.’… [But behind these numbers is a uglier truth.] The most important governing factor is economics, observes Jeremy Ney, an expert in graphically displaying social and economic disparities… “America is seeing the greatest gap in life expectancy across regions in the last 40 years’ said Ney.
“According to 2020 death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the longevity gulf is now 20 years wide — ranging from an average life expectancy from birth of 66.8 years in Oglala Lakota County, S.D., to 86.8 years in Summit County, Colo... The former is entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; the latter is a hive of affluent, physically active inhabitants within the state’s ski resort belt.
“That tells only part of the story. The lowest average life expectancies are seen in the states of the Southeast, according to 2020 figures from the CDC: South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi all had average life expectancies from birth of less than 75 years. (The lone state from outside the region in the bottom 10 was New Mexico.)”
It no secret that most of those states a red “stop creeping socialism” states that are cutting an increasing number of their citizens out of formerly available healthcare programs permitted under the Affordable Care Act or extended during COVID. Most of those states have much shorter life expectancies. And we have a new statistic as red states continue to make gun ownership easier and less controlled: for the first time, the leading cause of death among children, is gun violence.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if you are rich or have union-supplied “Cadillac healthcare coverage,” don’t worry about it… but it you are not… I hope you don’t live in one of those myth-making anti-“creeping socialism” states.
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