What is the driving force of the modern U.S. economy, that $12.5 trillion colossus? Can it be found in Silicon Valley, recovered from the dot.com slump and rejuvenated by the revivalist-tent atmosphere of Web 2.0? Or is it manufacturing, leaner than ever and profiting from IT-led productivity surges? Or is it even the industrial-military complex, fattened by the wars of 9/11 and an indulgent Pentagon?
According to Business Week, the answer is more prosaic. It’s hospitals:
In fact, at the rate it is growing, health care expenditure in the United States will account for an incredible 25% of GDP by 2030. And yet the mystery remains why the U.S. appears to get so little bang for its buck. With life expectancy, according to the CIA Factbook, standing at 77.85 years, the U.S. ranks 48 in the world, behind nations such as Jordan and Bosnia and Herzegovina. (But above Ireland, ranked 51). Infant mortality is worse in the States than it is in most developed nations (and, as recreational left-wingers love pointing out, in tatterdemalion Cuba).
Defenders of the American way of health often claim that the nation’s relatively poor (considering the outlays) overall health stats can be blamed on the fact that, unlike Europe and Japan, the U.S. has a heterogeneous population, including many poor immigrants (both legal and illegal) whose long-term health is likely to have been damaged before their arrival. (There also seems to be a slightly sinister tacit implication that Blacks and Hispanics lead more rackety lives than their European-sourced compatriots.)
This defence has been severely shaken by a report comparing the health of middle-age males in England and the U.S, which appeared in the May issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Financial Times reports :
To guard against any bias from self-reporting, the second batch of data used objective medical test results for people aged 40 to 70. These confirmed the higher rates of disease among Americans at all income levels.
Medical professionals are baffled by the disparity. Some have suggested that because obesity became a factor in the U.S. before Britain, it is now manifested earlier in the poorer health of middle-aged Americans. But others have argued that the key cause is stress, with a combination of income inequality, job insecurity, and status anxiety literally chewing away at the insides of the middle-aged American male.
Yet one wonders if such stress is confined to the other side of the Atlantic. Because if fear, greed, and keeping up with Jones really are making American men sick, then one dreads to ponder the condition of the average 55-year-old Irishman’s ticker…