Our health

Here's another article that exposes how poor our health is when compared with another developed country - in this case, Great Britain. The article is entitled, "U.S. health care gets shamed again". Here's an excerpt:

That study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week that compared the health of U.S. and British citizens spoke volumes about America's health care system.

Researchers from the U.S. and England were just trying to discover why poor people are less healthy than rich, but were astounded when their studies showed that poor people in England are actually as healthy as rich people in America and healthier when it comes to cases of diabetes, blood pressure and cancer.

But even more astounding to them was when comparing all white Brits with white Americans, regardless of income, the Americans have more diabetes, more heart disease, more respiratory problems and many more other diseases as well.

"It was a bit of a big shock," Michael Marmot of University College in London told National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." "I just didn't imagine we'd find it consistently across the board, with worse health in the United States compared with England."

Jim Smith of the Rand Corp. and one of the Americans who worked on the research added that, at first, no one wanted to believe the data.

But the results were quite clear it just isn't clear why.

For example, smoking rates are about the same for both countries. The British have a higher rate of heavy drinking, but more Americans are obese.

Yet, the per person spending on health care in the United States is nearly double that of England, which, of course, has a national health care system that covers every citizen of the country.

None of the researchers was willing to say it, but the fact that Americans have an enormous number of people without health insurance can't be overlooked as a cause. Tens of millions of our citizens even those who are working full-time jobs go without basic health care because of the high out-of-pocket costs, often until it's too late.

Why aren't we ashamed as a nation? That's the part I don't understand.