How America Came Heartbreakingly Close to Universal Healthcare (Literary Hub)

[Glia]

As was recently, and perhaps shockingly, reported, life expectancy gains in the US, which plateaued in 2012, have declined for the past two years. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported that the new average life expectancy for Americans is 78.7 years, 1.6 years behind the average in developed nations (including Canada, Germany, Mexico, France, Japan, and the UK), which is 80.3. As Dartmouth economists Ellen Meara and Jonathan Skinner remarked about the downward reversal of US life expectancy, “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude.”

Why this is happening is the direct result of the wasteful, inefficient, and woefully illogical profit-based healthcare system that has been built here in the 75 years since the end of World War II, fueled in part by an addiction not just to opioids but to many other drugs such as Adderall, created and reinforced by corrosive marketing, and collusion in rigged science, rank profiteering, and sloppy prescribing. But the decline in life expectancy has also been caused by our longstanding lack of attention to the many social factors that affect health. This is in stark contrast to the vision we showed at the end of WWII.

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