The other day I was reading an article from a couple of years ago, about how Russia moved into second place in arms sales in 2017 with $37 billion representing 9.5% of worldwide sales of the top 100. This number is of course a midget compared to the US arms sales of $226 billion which represented 57% of the same total (by the way these numbers do not include China as the statistics are not available or not clear).
I became curious to compare what countries spend on harming and killing (call it military and not defense) and what they spend on curing and caring like health care and dependence help. The subject is so vast and multivariate that I decided to first look into the US and satisfy myself with some older data, because the data is more easily available. And that's where the shock came.
With 78.6 years life expectancy in1990, US was 22nd out of the 35 industrialized OECD countries and this number dropped in 2016 and 2017 for the first time since 1993. Of course, some studies point to alarming rates of substance abuse and despair (meaning suicide) as the major culprits for this fall but whatever the cause, 22nd out of 35 is not that laudatory.
On a related note, in a 2014 survey of the health care systems of 11 developed countries, the US system was found to be the most expensive and worst performing for health access, efficiency and equity & fairness. Of course, you can argue that high cost is one of the main culprits in access problem and that is what the former US president, Donald Trump, was claiming and pining it on other countries getting lower drug prices on the back of the US.
I am not going to get into that debate but some shocking statistics:
According to a study by US National Institute of health (NIH) in 2013, of 17 high income countries, the US had the highest or near highest prevalence of obesity, car accident, infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancies, injuries and homicides. Some of those, such as car accidents, could be justifiably explained by probably higher driving distances and hours per capita but gosh obesity, infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted diseases? Which one of these is caused by high drug costs?
So, the land of the free and the home of the brave performs nearly last in many dimensions of health. I guess that's why you have to be brave because you have a higher likelihood to be health-free in the US compared to other developed nations. I think the US should worry more about some of these rots in its own backyard before giving lectures and lessons to others.
Paris, April 16, 2021
Zeejay