I love
Bill Bryson’s writing! I’ve just finished his excellent book ‘The Body: A Guide
for Occupants’. It’s absolutely packed with fascinating observations and detail.
In the penultimate chapter (‘Medicine Good and Bad’), for example, here are
just a FEW extracts about health in the US (note: by quoting this stuff, I’m
not ‘having a go’ at the US – I’m merely aware that, eventually it seems to me,
the UK follows America’s ‘lead’ in virtually everything!):
- “With regard to life expectancy… it is not a good idea to be an American”.
- “For every 400 middle-aged Americans who die each year, just 220 die in Australia, 230 in Britain, 290 in Germany and 300 in France”.
- “America spends more on health care than any other nation – two and a half times more per person than the average for all the other developed countries”.
- “Yet despite the generous spending, and the undoubted high quality of American hospitals and health care generally, the US comes just 31st in global rankings, behind Cyprus, Costa Rica and Chile, and just ahead of Cuba and Albania. How to explain such a paradox? Well, to begin with, and most inescapably, Americans lead more unhealthy lifestyles than most other people... As Allan S Detsky observed in the ‘New Yorker’, ‘Even wealthy Americans are not isolated from a lifestyle filled with oversized food portions, physical inactivity, and stress.’ The average Dutch or Swedish citizen consumes about 20% fewer calories than the average American, for instance.”
Although
Bryson (who was born in Iowa, but a British resident for most of his adult
life) is enthusiastic about the UK’s NHS, he points out: “For Britain, cancer
survival rates are grim and ought to be a matter of national concern”. He’s also critical about the UK spending “too
little” on health care: “The ‘British Medical Journal’ reported in early 2019
that cuts to health and social care budgets between 2010 and 2017 led to about
120,000 early deaths in the UK, a pretty shocking finding”.
Fascinating (and sobering) stuff.
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