Most Americans know that Canadians, Scandinavians, Cubans, Costa Ricans, Germans, Italians, Greeks (depressed yet?) and Aussies are living longer lives than Americans.
Well, things have gotten worse, according to the Washington Post:
Large swaths of the United States are showing decreasing or stagnating life expectancy even as the nation’s overall longevity trend has continued upwards, according to a county-by-county study of life expectancy over two decades.
In one-quarter of the country, girls born today may live shorter lives than their mothers, and the country as a whole is falling behind other industrialized nations in the march toward longer life, according to the study.
Where is the bad situation worst? Yup, in those states where politicians most angrily decry federal health care spending as evil socialism:
Among states, Mississippi fares the worst. Of its 82 counties, 26 had life expectancies for men in 2007 that were roughly 66 to 69 years.
Wait a second!? Aren't we spending over 50 percent more of our economic output on health care (including terrible junk-surance policies) than the rest of the world? WTF? (WTF in the Sarah Palin, not the Barack Obama sense.)
What surprised Murray and his team was that despite increased consciousness about disparities and per capita spending on health care that is at least 50 percent higher than European countries, the United States is falling farther behind them with each passing year.
“My expectation was that in the last decade we would at least be keeping up in terms of the pace of progress. But that’s not what’s happening,” said Murray.
I'm surprised that Murray is surprised. True, health care spending has increased, but it's just gone to the profits of the bloodsucking thugs who run extreme-profit insurance companies that are now pushing more Americans than ever into junk-surance plans with $10,000 deductibles that mean one thing: nobody is going to the doctor's office unless they're about to die.
So, in short, the problem? Aetna, CIGNA, WellPoint, Humana and United HealthCare.
The solution? Improved Medicare for all, the single-payer program that is already world famous for its ability to control costs and deliver excellent care that people -- our seniors -- just love.
Again, the problem, which is insurance company thugs using your money to finance bullshit get rich quick schemes by manipulating their stock prices (THANK YOU, Wendell Potter!):
CIGNA's net income for the first quarter of this year was $429 million. So what did the company do with its wealth? Well, between January 1 and May 4, the company repurchased approximately 4.9 million shares of its own stock for $210 million.
The magic works like this: when you buy back shares of your own stock, those shares are "retired," meaning that there are fewer shares outstanding. Reducing the number of shares available for purchase changes the mathematical equation used to determine the EPS. The reduction gives the EPS a boost. The more shares you buy back, the bigger the boost.
All of the big for-profit insurers have been on a buyback binge lately. Humana executives announced a few weeks ago that it would be buying back $1 billion of its own shares between now and June 2013. That's a lot of money, of course, but nothing compared to what UnitedHealth said it plans to do. UnitedHealth's executives said the company plans to repurchase up to 110 million shares in the coming months. If UnitedHealth were to buy all those shares today, while the stock price is trading at around $50 per share, it would be spending $5.5 billion (of money that came from you, if you are a UnitedHealth policyholder) to make all those shares of stock go poof.
And, the solution:
No wonder the British -- and the rest of the world -- are terrified of American health care. They just want to stay alive.