WAR ON THE POOR
Abandoning America
The Covid-related drop in life expectancy is 8.5 times higher in America than in other rich countries
The world watched this week as desperate Afghans fleeing the Taliban swarmed American planes at Kabul airport. Horrifying as the scene was, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. American governments at all levels have already abandoned their own people, and the pandemic highlights that failure.
Want evidence?
Pre-Covid-19, the life expectancy of the average American had already fallen below virtually every other wealthy nation, despite spending far more per capita on health care. 2020 saw life expectancy shortened by 1.5 years overall, by 2.9 years if you’re Black, and by an astonishing 3.7 years for Hispanic males.
Sure, but Covid, right? Nothing you can do. It’s a bad scene everywhere.
Not as bad as the US. A study from the British Medical Journal found that the 2020 drop in life expectancy was 8.5 times higher in America than in other rich countries, with the change substantially greater for Black and Hispanic Americans.
That could just be coincidence, but it seems a whole lot more likely that it has to do with poverty, income inequality, and what the BMJ — which doesn’t mince words — calls “longstanding policy choices and systemic racism”(even with some income gains in 2019, income among Black and Hispanic Americans remains much lower than that of whites).
If the stats above aren’t sufficiently shocking — and if they’re not, you’re seriously jaded — a 2017 study in The Lancet noted that in America the life expectancy difference between the richest and poorest 1% of the population is 10·1 years for women and 14·6 years for men.
But, you’re saying, why doesn’t everyone just get rich then? Land of Opportunity!
Not that easy.
If you’re poor in America, you’re likely to remain poor, and so are your kids and your grandkids. Socioeconomic upward mobility has been grinding to a halt since the Reagan years. If you were born in 1980 your chances of earning more than your parents are half that of someone born in 1940.
It’s unlikely to improve for the next generation either. Sorry Gen Y, but there’s always driving Uber! Until self-driving cars, anyway, which should be coming any day now.
And money comes in handy if you get sick in the United States.
Every other wealthy country has universal healthcare, which isn’t perfect but means everyone gets medical treatment regardless of income level. It’s unclear if Americans understand that other nations don’t have middle-class families moving into storage units because their health insurance has been cut off, or people dying of treatable diseases because they can’t afford a doctor.
Guys, it’s not normal to go cyber-panhandling on GoFundMe to pay for cancer treatments.
The reason for this state of affairs is greed. Universal healthcare is cheaper and more efficient than having private insurance companies skimming cash off of every medical interaction while they decide who lives and who dies. But when you have money — and insurance companies do — you have clout in the US political system.
Summary of the above:
If you’re a minority you’re more likely to be born poor. If you’re born poor, you’re more likely to stay poor. If you stay poor, you’re more likely to die from inadequate medical treatment.
Layered on top of all this is Covid, which has killed somewhere north of 600,000 Americans. Some of these deaths were avoidable, some were not ; the role of pandemic mismanagement and for-profit healthcare in Covid deaths is hard to quantify.
However, what’s truly evil is the current crop of American governors working to actively prolong and worsen the pandemic. Greg Abbot in Texas, and Ron DeSantis in Florida, among others, are vigorously discouraging or banning mask mandates, vaccine requirements for health care workers, and other measures that would save lives.
Why?
Hard to say, although they seem to be catering to a noisy minority of angry bullies and online conspiracy aficionados, aka True Americans. The word “freedom” comes up a lot, but it’s unclear why requiring a mask at Walmart is more Communist than requiring pants, especially since the former is a public health measure, the latter an aesthetic preference.
The results have been predictable, with Delta variant cases and deaths skyrocketing, particularly in states run by Chief Executives who have access to gold-plated healthcare, and aren’t much interested in people who don’t.
Abandoning allies is shocking; abandoning your own citizens is reprehensible. Death by poverty should not be the cost of doing business.
If you got this far, you might like this story:
https://readmedium.com/save-the-boys-save-the-world-31b09a47df88
