Comparisons

We have been living in Europe for almost five months now. Seems like forever and a day. One of the greatest things about being here is being in my school, which for those of you who don’t know is not an Italian school. It is also not an American school. It is called an “International School” meaning students come from all over the world. Classes are in English because English is almost an international language. Most other developed countries, especially the educated youth, speak english.
Before I left, I was well aware that America had some problems when compared to the rest of the world. But because we are so isolated in both location, and by the media which informs us little of the goings on in other nations, I was not sure exactly how deep those differences go, and how serious they are.

I have students in my classes from France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Japan, Mexico, and of course the United States. I am sure there are other nations represented at the school, I just haven’t met those kids yet.

Just like one of my other posts said, I have been here so long that I rarely ponder on the state of the USA lately. The news here does report in depth about what goes on at home, especially the printed media, which is incredible, but I don’t watch TV and never buy newspapers. Just don’t have the time. But a few days ago we had a conversation with some friends of ours that made me start thinking again.

His name is Aldo, and we went out for dinner with he and his girlfriend Daniella. We started talking about how cheap it is to travel in Europe. All of the public transportation is government-run, including the international train systems, which are sponsored by the EU to increase the ease and lessen the expense of travel. Also, there are many “socialized” airlines, funded by various governments. According to Aldo, he goes back to Spain, where he is originally from, to visit family quite often. The cost? Around 40 euro round trip. You couldn’t fly from New York to Philly for $40, or even $100. The difference? Means of travel are public services, rather than money making ventures. The American way to look at this is to think: dirty planes, untrained pilots, unsafe in general; the average non-subjective American view of anything that is government-run and therefore “socialist” or worse, the dreaded “communist.” But on the contrary, planes are new and up-to-date. Employees are friendly (far more friendly than in the US), pilots are well trained and safety records are strong. In fact, where in the United States we are increasingly allowing airlines to govern themselves by allowing them to do their own inspections, in the EU the government is getting increasingly involved in this process. After all, we know it is absurd to allow a corporation to set their own safety standards. But in the States, this is becoming more and more popular, unbeknownst to the average citizen: they don’t talk about it on Fox or CNN.

This led to another conversation: the typical American view of foreign healthcare, especially those systems that are “universal” or, in other terms, “free”. Italy is one of those countries. Like most developed nations, actually, like ALL developed nations other than the US, Italy’s healthcare system is completely free to all citizens, and depending on the severity of the issue, free for foreigners as well. To explain that a little: if you are a foreigner and you come and get a cold, it will cost you about €60 to see a doctor, plus the cost of a prescription, which is always far less than in the States. If you have a heart attack and go to the hospital, all of your care will be free, even as a non-citizen. All of this comes from the fact that people here believe that people should care about people. Instead of those who can pay simply paying for themselves, and the lesser of us getting stepped on, here, and in all other developed nations, those who can pay pay for everyone. You get the same service regardless of who you are.

Again, the typical American view of public health care systems is that hospitals are dirty, doctors are overworked and under-trained, facilities are second-rate, wait times are long, and the list goes on. Again, completely untrue. I have been to the hospital in the US. Several times actually. When my wife cut her finger and we had to go to the emergency room, we waited upwards of five hours to see someone, with only about four people in the waiting room with us. Then we saw a medical student, not a doctor, who ran her finger under water and put crazy glue on it. The bill was around $2,800, which our insurance company tried very hard to get out of paying. Our co-pay was about $250. Insane considering we paid over $800 a month for our insurance.

Before we left for Italy, upon telling someone I met we were coming here, her reply was, “that’s great. Just don’t get sick.” What Aldo said about the American perception of the Italian system was this:

“The conditions and expertise of the doctors at the Sanitaria (public hospitals) is great. You don’t wait long, they are very clean and very up to date. If it weren’t like this, the Italians would be in the streets and there would be riots. It has happened before.”

Maybe American’s poor views of public systems stem from our own very poor public systems. Our “public” hospitals, or clinics, are a disgrace, and most government-run agencies are a disaster, aside from the Postal Service which is okay in my book.

I saw Michael Moore’s film, Sicko, and something an American living in France said was very similar to what Aldo had told me about Italians. She said, essentially, that the government in France is scared of the people. Whereas in the States, the people are scared of the government.

How true this is. What happened to our revolutionary spirit? What happened to Americans being highly informed people who react when things aren’t right? What happened to the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War?

Did you know that in both France and Sweden, and I’m sure many other nations, women get one year off, with fully pay, after having a baby? After we had Giada, Emily got six weeks and our payment was about $175 a week minus taxes. Thank God I decent a good paying job, and we had special living circumstances that allowed us to easily afford everything we needed. But, had we been in a normal situation, things would have been much different. Imagine a single mom trying to run a household on $175 a week minus taxes? It is impossible.

Additionally, most other developed countries get a minimum of four paid weeks off every year. In Italy, people take the entire month of August off. It is just the way it is. If the government, or employers, try to take away any vacations, people take to the streets. In the States, you have to be a millionaire to take off four or five weeks. Here, four or five is a minimum. Many people get as many as eight weeks off. Yes. Eight weeks. Two months.

One of the reasons for the successes of these public systems is that, because they are public, a lot of attention is payed to prevention. In the US, we have a reactionary system. When people get sick, our system responds to make them well (or make them even sicker). In many US hospitals, the goal is not to make people well, but to keep them in the hospital for as long as possible, and to put them on as many medications as possible, therefore maximizing profits for the health care system. Little attention is paid to general overall health. After all, if we were healthy, they system wouldn’t make as much money.
On the contrary, when you have a public system, it is in the government’s interest to make sure the public is healthy. A healthier public means less money spent on health care. For this reason, doctors in many countries with public systems get bonuses when they do such things as to get clients to stop smoking, or loose weight, or lower their cholesterol. Also, a public health care system leads to other government actions to protect the public. For example, hormones in meat are banned in the EU, because they have been proven to cause a myriad of health problems. Mercury has been completely banned in the EU for many years. We still use it in our vaccines. The EU has stricter standards on chemicals in electronics, which cause over 70% of our own landfill pollution, but make up only a small fraction of actual items in landfills. The list goes on and on, but hopefully you get my point: a public system means the government is concerned with the health of the public. This doesn’t mean they invade your home and make you loose weight, it means that they make sure you have available to you, for free, many preventative systems: nutritionists, chiropractors, psychiatrists, etc, and they give doctors an incentive to make sure you are healthy.

Knowing all this to be a fact, I am wondering more and more… what are we doing back at home in the USA? Why are we fighting so hard against this system? We already have “socialized systems” like our schools, postal service, other domestic services, some transportation, social security and medicare (which are both screwed up, but that’s another issue of corruption and greed). What are we waiting for? When will we get back the spirit of our forefathers? When will we take to the streets and be heard? When will we demand that all men not only be created equal in theory, but be treated equally? Maybe then, Americans will again have a longer life-span than people living in Cuba (whose life-spans surpass ours, probably due to the fact that their healthcare is top-notch, and also free).

One of the people in Sicko said something great, a British man speaking about why Great Britain, after being devastated by the second world war, had created a public health care system. In summary, he said this (no quotes because it is not a quote):
After WWII Britain was devastated. During the war the economy had been very strong. People all working to build bombs and tanks and guns. After the war, I suppose people figured, if we can employ people to build bombs and guns, why can’t we employ them to build schools and hospitals and libraries? If we can find the money to kill people, we can surely find the money to help people.

He also pointed out, very truly, that public health care is a very democratic idea. He said that democracy moved the power from the wealthy class and the corporations to the ballot box. From the rich to the poor. Before democracy, health care was only accessible to the rich. You got what you paid for. So what more of a democratic idea could it be than to move the power from the rich few to the masses of lower and middle class people?

He also made a very good connection to 9/11 in the US, and WWII in G.B. He pointed out how Americans all banded together after 9/11 to help each other. There was solidarity between us. In Great Britain, over 40,000 civilians were killed during WWII. The solidarity felt between the citizens of this nation could not have been stronger. It was in this atmosphere that their public health system was created. Additionally, Great Britain was in horrible shape after the war. It’s cities were destroyed, and the government was nearly bankrupt. It was in these conditions that they created a very successful public health system. Imagine the one the US could create?

One more fact: the US health care system is the most expensive system in the world. In other words, we as American pay more for health care than any other nation on earth. Therefore, Americans fear of high taxes when paying into a public health system is debunked. People in France and Italy (and everywhere else) pay far less in taxes to be included in their public system than we in American pay in insurance premiums and co-pays to be a part of our private one.

I could go on and on about this. I know many people back in the States just think that things will work themselves out. This is unfortunately not true. Many others think that they will just let their neighbors worry about it. We are all too busy and overworked to be messing around with protests and making demands of the government. But maybe we all have to sacrifice a little for our children and grandchildren. If there are 50 million Americans who have no insurance, and are unable to receive medical attention, how many will there be when my daughter is grown up? Will she be one of them? Will she have to go through her days hoping and praying that her kids don’t get sick?

This is a ranking of the world’s health care systems according to the World Health Organization (sorry it is horizontal, just copied and pasted from WHO site and this is how it came out. No way I was typing all of this):



1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
37 United States of America
38 Slovenia
39 Cuba
40 Brunei
41 New Zealand
42 Bahrain
43 Croatia
44 Qatar
45 Kuwait
46 Barbados
47 Thailand
48 Czech Republic
49 Malaysia
50 Poland
51 Dominican Republic
52 Tunisia
53 Jamaica
54 Venezuela
55 Albania
56 Seychelles
57 Paraguay
58 South Korea
59 Senegal
60 Philippines
61 Mexico
62 Slovakia
63 Egypt
64 Kazakhstan
65 Uruguay
66 Hungary
67 Trinidad and Tobago
68 Saint Lucia
69 Belize
70 Turkey
71 Nicaragua
72 Belarus
73 Lithuania
74 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
75 Argentina
76 Sri Lanka
77 Estonia
78 Guatemala
79 Ukraine
80 Solomon Islands
81 Algeria
82 Palau

The list goes on, but you get the point. We pay more than everyone else, per person, and we receive less. What's wrong with that picture?


*I know that a lot of people arbitrarily dislike Michael Moore. Unfortunately, most of those people have not seen his films, or have watched them with a completely closed mind and so have gotten nothing out of them. In some senses, his movies May be “biased.” Maybe he doesn’t show any of the problems in other nations health care systems, and maybe doesn’t point out one single positive point about George Bush (are there any?). But the fact remains that his movies are factual. There are no half-truths or made up tales. That’s why all anybody can say about his work is that they don’t like him; he’s fat or ignorant.

If someone were to find something untrue in one of his movies, you can bet it would make headlines across the US. Bill O’Reilly would be talking about it for weeks on end. That hasn’t happened yet, after all these years, and so that must lead us to believe everything is 100% true. On top of that, our media is completely one-sided too. Even the more “liberal” of networks rarely go near serious issues like this. Forget Fox news. So why not see the other side of the story? Few people freak out and refuse to watch the main stream news networks, so why all the complaining and boycotting of Moore’s films? If you haven’t seen Bowling for Columbine, Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9/11 and most importantly, Sicko, go see them. Or better yet, if you don’t want to give him your money, download them for free, like I did. You can’t preach against something if you aren’t even familiar with it.