Both GDP and living standards are discussed in the article. The NHS is addressed near the beginning as proof of the deteriorating condition of living standards. 1/10th of the population are on a waiting list for care. 1/10th have done DIY dental work.
You're right that GDP is not a measure of living standards. But neither is saying "NHS" a measure of living standards. Do you actually have a measure you could refer to in order to prove the article wrong?
Preventative interventions can; preventing obesity falls under the purview of healthcare departments like the NHS.
But neither private insurance nor hospitals have any incentive to operate preventatively because insurance can just increase premiums and everybody happily makes more money... Some might observe how that also increases the GDP...
The USA doesn't do much of that though. It prefers medical care.
(E.g., adding a dose-dependent sin tax on food-like substances with added sugar, subsidizing real food for those on SNAP. Unpopular because who doesn't want their simple carbs?)
They don't want to, any more than someone who steps into traffic carelessly wants to have a broken hip (albeit on a different time scale). That's a stunningly paternalistic view.
I honestly don't understand this statement. What else besides healthcare could fix that? Are you arguing that Mississippi obesity is due to genetics and cannot be changed?
The only other thing I can think of that would affect state wide obesity is food security and quality. Proper healthcare would be my first pick for fixing obesity.
I don't think it's a matter of better or worse quality, the Healthcare being expensive and for profit in Mississippi leads to people just not going to the doctor at all
What matters is the outcomes. If nobody is able to use a world-class healthcare system (for whatever reason, could be affordability as in the US or availability as in the UK), then as a whole it's as good as no healthcare.
An even stronger case is pointing out that Japan has a lower GDP per capita than Mississippi. But walk around Japan and try to claim that it's "poorer" than even a wealthy state in the US.
So the same quality and reach of the public transit in rural Japan and rural USA? The same percentage of net income spent on the similar healthcare procedures in rural Japan and rural USA? The same quality and percentage of net income spent on the education in rural Japan and rural USA? I have doubts.
I live in a pretty rural, red small town USA and we have a great bus system. Disabled/elderly/sick can even call and be picked up in front of their home. Our library system is expanding in size and scope (they do a heritage seedbank now). Schools are tough to fund because the feds own most of the land and even though the deal was we lost tax revenue because federal land but that was made up for in logging/mining revenue the feds just stopped giving permits and screwed our community out of the jobs/promised revenue. Rural America isn't all the hellscape the internet pretends it is.
Where is this? Because I live in an area with what is considered one of the best public transit systems in the US and even then the bus system is iffy at the edges of the metro area. I am curious to see your bus schedule.
I get your request but I would be doxing myself and by extension people/businesses I have sometimes brought up here (some of the tech scene is kinda small).
The nice things about a small town is our edge cases aren't far from our non-edge cases so we can offer things like pickup/dropoff at home or serve them normally and not add much to routes. It was such a godsend when my mom was dying of cancer. Not sure the schedule would represent that as it is an off schedule/off published route service.
GDP is one of the most meaningless ways to compare the standard of living in two countries. It can only compare their financial position and it's questionably good at that.
> The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
That article fails to note that the USA lags behind the UK in global rankings of overall dental health. We are either joint fourth (Sweden) or fifth; the USA is ninth.
NHS dentists are scarce for policy reasons that are inexcusible. But private dental care here is not actually particularly expensive unless you want it to be, and it is good.
(Again, don't imagine that "private healthcare" in the UK is expensive in the way it is in the USA).
We have our problems and they are escalating in some ways, but my main issue with this article is that again US writers tend to assume that words and terminology have their US meaning and broader connotations.
Standard of living comparisons that use US concepts (car ownership, air conditioning ownership, even in the recent past comparing how many people dry their clothes outdoors, which is common American poverty indicator) just cannot capture the nuance in a way that makes sense.
>The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care
This figure is from an article in the Times, and has no connection to official NHS figures. The Times just guessed how much it might be, and reported it as fact. Then, since The Times is a paper of record, other news outlets have run with it.
It is paywalled. I only had access to the first two paragraphs. Regardless, that description changes nothing. "The NHS is overburdened" is a problem, but it is still better than not having the NHS at all.
The unfortunate thing is though that general medical care under the NHS is a complete postcode lottery - if you're lucky enough to be registered with a decent practice you're okay, if you're not you're screwed.
On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.
A lot of fellow Eastern Europeans travel back home to get medical care. This is good testament about the quality of care and personal in UK - since ours are like take out of a horror movie
Eastern Europeans doing "medical tourism" is often powered by higher salaries in the West and lower living standards in the East. That's true not only for healthcare but for majority of services. You absolutely can get quality private care in the West - it's just much more expensive. The private care is also much less affordable for the locals in the East.
At least in Germany, you can opt out for private health insurance. I don't know if that's the case in the UK. There're also many private hospitals in Denmark. And in the latter, you have right to get treated in those if there're no public healthcare options available in reasonable time. But both Germany and Denmark suffer from the same issues as the UK, of course.
That is to say, private care is often available in the West. It just comes with a hefty price tag.
While true, isn't that a rich life benefit in general? E.g. Brits can choose (important hat they have options) to trade some time to get even cheaper and just as good healthcare services compared to Mississippians who don't have such an option at all. So an aggregated quality of life for Brits is even higher because of that.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The article outlines how hard it is to get dental care in the UK, which just isn't going to be as difficult in Mississippi. Mississippi's Medicaid covers emergency dental care so it's available, you just probably have to drive, but that's true of most things in most of the US. The real healthcare issue in Mississippi is the shortage of providers, which is also an issue in most of the UK.
The article outline that 1 in 10 people in the UK have done DIY emergency dental care, wich suggests strongly that the availability is less good than advertised. In fact a large portion of the article is about growing NHS wait times.
I know about 6-700 people over here in the UK, I live in a poor-ish Northern town and I don't know a single person who's done "DIY dental care". Not one.
Now 600 people is a lot smaller than 60 million, I don't doubt there are people who have pulled a tooth out, but to get those sorts of figures, you'd have to count all the kids who pull out a tooth with a bit of string to get £1 from the tooth fairy.
This is a completely bogus article and it's no surprise that the Brits are jumping in to uh complain. There's no comparison between the two areas.And to discuss the failings of the NHS and dentistry is just laughable. They're not perfect, but they're really a lot better than dying because you don't have your credit card. Nobody's ever died in the UK because they didn't have a credit card.
However, GDP may be measuring the opposite of living standards. In the UK, the NHS will be effectively paying cost prices for healthcare (which is generally available free to the public), whereas Mississippi will presumably factor in expensive healthcare as part of the GDP. Higher GDP, but a lower living standard if you have very limited access to healthcare.
This comparison of the large Western European economies (most frequently Germany) to America's poorest state based on GDP-per-capita is all the rage on the US right at the moment.
It's an eye-catcher, but obviously fallacious - the usual counter has been to point out the life expectancy difference of 10+ years.
Not that most people are particularly interested in nuance, smh
Some people are just all-in on the moronic MAGA nationalism and refuse to earnestly engage with critiques of the US. America is always better than Europe, even when it's not.
There are also those who believe the opposite. They constantly point out Scandinavian countries as somehow having solved every problem that exists in the US…despite being very different in almost every dimension one can think of.
The way I've seen Scandinavia referenced has been more of a counterpoint to dysfunctional aspects of the US having to be the way they are.
There is nothing definitively different about the US that prevents it from solving a lot of its social issues by doing the same as is done elsewhere. We know this because the social contract in the US post WW2 was quite similar to modern day Europe - e.g. 91% top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower [0].
A comparison between the quality of life of someone on median income in Mississippi vs the equivalent in the UK / Germany / France would be an extremely effective counter, too.
The gap is nowhere near that large when controlling for the difference in demographics. Despite that, America is undeniably obese which is easily the largest factor contributing to life expectancy.
It's fascinating to see to what lengths people will go to maintain their denial.
As someone who has been in and out, the poverty increase in Western Europe is astonishing. Whatever metrics I will show you, will meet something like "oh yeah but metrics X doesn't mean anything", but still, 20y ago buying a car was fairly standard. Going on holidays same. Let's not talk about buying a house. Nowadays, any of the above is considered as a sign of being "privileged", while it used to be middle-class before.
The same in the USA. The other day I saw someone claim that people have it better now because they have more phones and TVs, and that somehow outweighs not being able to afford cars and houses.
You're right that GDP is not a measure of living standards. But neither is saying "NHS" a measure of living standards. Do you actually have a measure you could refer to in order to prove the article wrong?