HEALTHCARE|MENTAL HEALTH

In America It’s A Matter of Life Or Death

The main reasons I decided to move to Europe despite the pandemic

It has been almost a year since I moved to Germany. I am oftentimes asked with extreme curiosity and puzzlement why I decided to move away from the United States indefinitely.

There are a multitude of reasons. (Mike Goldberg, here they are)

This story features one of the biggest.

First of all, I’m in my mid-forties, which is much different from my “free-spirited” self in my mid-twenties.

After almost 15 years in Philadelphia, where the majority of my friends and family live, it was a difficult decision to move over 4,000 miles across the ocean.

I did not have a definite job lined nor did I know if I would be able to stay longer than my tourist visa allowed which is only 90 days.

When I went back to college for the third time in my life, I started all over, pretty much from scratch, at the ripe old age of 36. At the time I had no plans of leaving the United States.

I was a health sciences major and was set on occupational therapy. I had been a licensed massage therapist for almost 10 years and wanted to transition from the field as I grew older.

Physical therapy intrigued me, but the required PhD for that program was much more than I wanted to pay, especially at that age. Occupational therapy only required a Master’s degree.

Long story short, I made a complete about face and decided to leave America altogether.

Why?

• The healthcare system in the United States is one of, if not the worst, of any developed nation.
• The rate of violent crime
• Too much consumerism and not enough community

If you have no idea what I’m talking about in terms of the U.S. health care system, let me enlighten you:

“Despite having the most expensive health care system, the United States ranks last overall compared with six other industrialized countries — Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — on measures of quality, efficiency, access to care, equity, and the ability to lead long, healthy, and productive lives, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report. While there is room for improvement in every country, the U.S. stands out for not getting good value for its health care dollars: it spent $7,290 per capita on health care in 2007 but ranks last among seven countries. The Netherlands, which spent $3,837 per capita on health care that year, ranks first.”

Here’s the link to the article.

There are a ton of articles about it.

While I was a massage therapist, I had a decent amount of doctors, dentists, medical assistants, physical therapists, and nurses who were clients.

Many of them were kind and intelligent people who were dismayed by the U.S.’s healthcare system.

It was a wake up call for me.

I wasn’t getting any younger and knew that I would eventually need to use my health insurance more often and for more extensive services than my usual yearly check-ups or vaccinations (pre-Covid).

I also heard more and more stories from a wide variety of clients who told me about their bad experiences. A few sued their doctor for malpractice and for good reasons. There were some I felt should have sued their doctor and didn’t.

Don’t get me started on how many “Go Fund Me” pages I’ve started seeing in recent years just to cover medical costs.

It began to scare me. Enough so that I began looking into other options for living out my “golden years”.

In 2014, I went to Europe for the first time since 1999. I flew into London, spent a day there. Then 2 days in Paris and 10 days in 3 cities in Italy.

It changed me forever.

I felt more at ease there.

It wasn’t just the fact that I was on vacation.

It was the fact that I felt safer.

I could breathe easier.

There weren’t reports of gunfire or mass shootings in the news that has become fairly common in the United States, especially in Philly.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about in terms of gun violence, let me enlighten you a bit here:

“By almost every measure, 2021 has already been a terrible year for gun violence. Many fear it will get worse. Last weekend alone, more than 120 people died in shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, with three especially dangerous incidents in Austin, Chicago and Savannah, Ga., leaving two dead and at least 30 injured.

Through the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States, about 54 lives lost per day, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization. That’s 14 more deaths per day than the average toll during the same period of the previous six years.”

Here’s a link to that article, from June 2021 in The Washington Post.

The degree of violence in the United States only seems to be getting worse and that scares me as well, especially as I get older.

When I returned to the United States in 2014, after my 2 weeks in Europe, I felt homesick for a good month or so.

It was odd.

I missed the amazing food. I missed being inundated by incredible art that was all around me while merely walking the streets.

However, I came to realize that what I missed most was a sense of community and belonging in simply being human.

American can be a very lonely place, especially in large, urban cities. People might act friendly, and some genuinely are, but the vast majority of people with whom I have come into contact over the years tend to be guarded and wary of strangers, especially foreigners.

Small talk is quite common, but real talk about sincere feelings from a truly open mind and heart is quite UNcommon in the United States.

This also seems to be getting worse.

Here’s one last article, from February 2021 in a report by Harvard University, to help illustrate what I mean:

“Our new report suggests that 36% of all Americans — including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children — feel “serious loneliness.” Not surprisingly, loneliness appears to have increased substantially since the outbreak of the global pandemic.

The report also explores the many types of loneliness, various causes of loneliness, and the potentially steep costs of loneliness, including early mortality and a wide array of serious physical and emotional problems, including depression, anxiety, heart disease, substance abuse, and domestic abuse.”

There are things that I love about the United States, such as it’s National Parks.

I simply don’t feel at home there anymore.

I didn’t even get into the racial tensions that continue to escalate there as well.

How tired I became of reading and hearing about or experiencing yet another racial injustice while living in a country that claims to be “the land of the free and home of the brave.”

I wanted out.

So I took a leap of faith and set myself free.