Live to 43 or 86? Depends on Where You Live
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Reuters, August 28, 2008
Major inequalities in health and life expectancy persist worldwide, according to an independent World Health Organization commission which on Thursday called for all countries to offer universal health care.
Huge discrepancies also exist within countries, including Scotland where a boy born in the deprived Glasgow suburb of Calton can expect to live 28 years less than one born in affluent Lenzie, just 13 km (8 miles) across town, it said.
“The health inequities we see in the world are absolutely dramatic in their scale,” said Michael Marmot, a WHO health researcher, who chaired the commission, told reporters.
{snip}
The Commission on Social Determinants of Health, composed of 19 independent experts, handed over its findings to the World Health Organization (WHO). The United Nations agency ordered the report three years ago.
“One of the recommendations in the Commission’s report is that there should be universal health care systems that are available to people regardless of ability to pay,” said Marmot, head of the epidemiology and public health department at University College London.
{snip}
(Posted on August 29, 2008)
Comments
But there already is universal health care in the country where Glasgow is in. Yet, the “disparity” exists.
Posted by Question Diversity at 5:50 PM on August 29
Britain does have universal healthcare. Maybe the WHO should investigate what those two groups of Glaswegians are doing before they get to a Doctor if they wish to explain differences in longevity.
And of course, no MSM article on the topic of health would be complete without an attempt to extort the Western world to benefit Third world dirt-holes.
Posted by Brian at 6:35 PM on August 29
Whenever I read articles like this, it is always some Asian country like Japan that they place on top of the list “because they are just a healthier people”. In the mean time white countries such as San Marino and Switzerland never get mentioned. Instead, if any white countries are mentioned at all, they get bashed for their inequalities with their health care systems.
Posted by Courtney at 6:56 PM on August 29
uhhh, sure, offer universal health care so we can all live to 43 instead of 86. Universal health care is socialized medicine which is a disaster. Canada has it, canadians come here for tests rather than wait six months in Canada. Sure, health care is out the roof in costs. But there has to be a better system than socialized universal health care. Under universal, we are all poor because of the rise in taxes to support it. World health organization is a farce to say the least. Most would call it a fraud.
Posted by Roller at 7:12 PM on August 29
. . .a boy born in the deprived Glasgow suburb of Calton can expect to live 28 years less than one born in affluent Lenzie . . .
This is obviously not a matter of differences in health care, but of differences in violent crime. Changes in the health care system won’t make a difference.
P.S. Reuters often pushes socialist ideas in its “news” stories.
Posted by Reader-1 at 7:20 PM on August 29
It is all to do with life style. Glaswegians are renowned for their heavy drinking and poor attitudes to keeping fit, and a propensity for drunken brawling in public Being a sports fan there means that you support as a spectator the local football team, and after a game, win or lose, go and get motherless with drink or drugs. There were areas there I would not enter 50 years ago, with broken bottles in the streets making driving your car an obstacle course, and to go into a bar as a starnegr would have been asking for trouble especially with an English (as opposed to a Glasgow Scottish) accent. it is all to do with choice of lifestyle, as I have said already.
Posted by B J Deller at 12:46 AM on August 30
Just so long as our pro-scottish government in UK bleeds the English taxpayer to fund each and every scot in scotland (man, woman and child) to the tune of £1,400 per annum, which is over and above what they get anyway, there is absolutely no excuse for any failure whatsoever in the areas of scottish health, education and crime prevention. If these do fail, and this story appears to confirm that they do fail, then can we English please have our money back? Only today, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in our long time Labour government publicly admitted that the UK is in the worst financial crisis for 60 years. I do believe he is a scot and our Prime Minister (also a scot) appointed him to the post.
Posted by yorkshireman at 1:25 AM on August 30
The poorest classes in Britain are prone to the following, just as they were when George Orwell wrote ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ in the 1930s:
Bad and unhealthy diets rich in fats, salt and sugar plus heavy smoking from an early age plus high alcohol consumption and, not least, lack of healthy exercise.
In this, parts of Scotland and Northern England resemble areas of Russia or some heavy-industry areas of Bulgaria.
I may well be wrong, since I know the U.S.A. only superficially, but my guess is that you might find the same sort of factors evident in places like Gary, Indiana.
Posted by Bill Corr at 8:46 AM on August 30
Deep-fried Mars Bars, deep-fried pizza, deep-fried haggis and, believe it or not, deep-fried ice cream, are all commonly available in parts of Scotland, particularly Glasgow.
Such a diet, coupled with heavy smoking and a culture of legendarily hard drinking, allied to a macho disregard of any governmental advice, is partly the answer to the shocking life expectancy shortfall.
The other factor is the widespread use of hard drugs. A co-worker of mine was shown a cemetery just outside Glasgow, which had contained a disturbingly high and rapidly growing percentage of the young.
Low expectations, no real life chances, apathy and despair . . tragic, but there it is.
Posted by Not Economically Viable at 11:27 AM on August 30
I have a good friend who lives in Canada and one time she told me she had to wait six months to have certain testing done…I asked…what about emergencys??? She said you have to wait in line even then….if that is universal healthcare, they can keep it, besides if they would have that type of healthcare here in the USA the only ones who they will treat first are…illegals, blacks, asians, indians and the whites will be at the end of the line, like we are in every other help we might need…we are second class citizens and….my friend told me…Canada is over run with pompus asians who think they are better than everyone else…it is a problem in Canada plus more muslims are moving in and they are even worse!!
Posted by lydia at 12:31 PM on August 30
“uhhh, sure, offer universal health care so we can all live to 43 instead of 86. Universal health care is socialized medicine which is a disaster. Canada has it, canadians come here for tests rather than wait six months in Canada. Sure, health care is out the roof in costs. But there has to be a better system than socialized universal health care. Under universal, we are all poor because of the rise in taxes to support it. World health organization is a farce to say the least. Most would call it a fraud.”
Posted by Roller at 7:12 PM on August 29
> I have to disagree with you on this one. I lived in a European country with universal health care and still have a good friend there. No one complains about the taxes, which are about what they are here anyway. What they don’t have is a huge defense budget and redundant inefficient government officials and departments. My friend was diagnosed with a malignant osteo-sarcoma eight years ago. He has had four operations and is currently in Switzerland getting very expensive photon treatment, which his government (Slovenia) is covering. Through this time, he had married for a second time and fathered two children to add to his two grown children, while building a new two story home.
When I worked there, I worked for an orthopedic surgeon in a new private office, but he also worked in a hospital. I learned that when important cases come up, they have a round table meeting to discuss the case, pooling all the best medical minds they have, to make a decision. Here, one doctor makes the decision and so we have had gizillions of unneccessary surgeries and proceedures like expensive and redundant imaging - because the docs and hospital like to run that bill up. So In my experience, government run universal health care would be a huge improvement over the totally corrupt system we have now.
Canadians with money and less patience come here for tests, etc. The Canadians I have known are appalled at the idea that they must pay anything in the U.S. for health care.
The problem is and the difference with a country like Slovenia is that we have a population of third world immigrants, legal and illegal that have nearly bankrupted many states hospitals. Many hospitals in the Southwest have had to close their ER rooms and the doctors hide in private offices so that they can’t so easily be used for free. But the real problem is that unless we can curtail immigration and get a proportional tax from new immigrants, instead of giving them the huge plethora of free services and privilieges we do, universal health care in this country would finish us off economically and cause a crash that I think would turn into a world wide depression.
Finally, cohesive ethnic and racial groups are more likely to feel friendly to universal coverage because they see themselves as a unified family. That is certainly the situation in Slovenia. In the U.S., practially everyone is a stranger. It may be the the idea of individual responsibility has made us too hard and selfish for our own good.
As I have written on Amren times before, it is going to take a kind of socialism to provide for any real white survival. The community is going to have to find a way to help the least members survive and produce useful community members. If whites cannot do that, I think all this discussion is ultimately only a kind of therapy session for those driven to neurosis over the changing power structure, but unwilling or unable to get beyond their complaints.
Posted by Whiteplight at 4:12 PM on August 30
What is not often admitted about the problems in poor White urban Britain is that many of them have their roots in the importation of a cheap ethnic labouring class during the 19th century - mainly Cathloic Irish and, in Glasgow’s case, Scottish highlanders as well.
In a squalid, urban environment, this helped to create the alienation and anti-social feeling that underpins much of the self destructive behavious typical of parts of Glasgow.
Another factor was the class apartheid that followed socialist schemes to do away with the squalid tennaments by building large featureless housing schemes, that ended up being populated solely by members of the lower classes as those higher up the social ladder took off for the leafy suburbs.
This was equivalent to what happened in the Black ghettoes, when better off Blacks were able to leave the ghetto in the era of civil rights, leaving behind the poorer Blacks. Without positive role models, the urban poor in both cases deteriorated into various forms of substance abuse and gang-related violence.
What happened in Scotland has its roots in the early 19th century and is based on a much smaller racial and cultural difference, but the effects continue to be felt to this day.
Posted by Albert McSchweitzer at 7:45 AM on August 31
Article: “a boy born in the deprived Glasgow suburb of Calton can expect to live 28 years less”
It’s true that, to use statistical terminology, the expected male life-span is 28 years less in Calton, but it’s vital to understand the technical meaning of “expected” here. More precisely, the finding is that the arithmetic mean of the age of death is 28 years lower, and this is almost certainly caused by a highly skewed distribution: a small minority of males is dying at a low age. Because of this skewed distribution, the vast majority of males will live for longer than this average life-span — it may sound absurd, but that’s skewed distributions for you. Thus the initial sentence, “can expect to live 28 years less” is quite false.
“there should be universal health care systems that are available to people regardless of ability to pay”
We already have this in Britain, spending some $200 billion per year. We also have a generous welfare system: we spent some $30 billion on “incapacity benefit” last year.
Posted by Dryden at 7:26 AM on September 1
“The problem is and the difference with a country like Slovenia is that we have a population of third world immigrants, legal and illegal that have nearly bankrupted many states hospitals. Many hospitals in the Southwest have had to close their ER rooms and the doctors hide in private offices so that they can’t so easily be used for free. But the real problem is that unless we can curtail immigration and get a proportional tax from new immigrants, instead of giving them the huge plethora of free services and privilieges we do, universal health care in this country would finish us off economically”
This is the point so many that are for universal healthcare don’t or can’t admit. We already pay billions for free medical for illegals and other non-white legal migrants. Europe and Canada haven’t had this problem to the extent we have. Unless we change this, universal healthcare will sink us financially and the quality will be horrible. I live in Texas and our emergency rooms are clogged with Mexicans and we spend 5 billion a year alone for illegals.
“In the U.S., practially everyone is a stranger. It may be the the idea of individual responsibility has made us too hard and selfish for our own good.”
I disagree. We spend billions on Mexican citizens at the expense of our own people. We are too soft and giving for our own good.
Posted by KC at 4:51 AM on September 4
“Universal health care is socialized medicine which is a disaster.”
“So In my experience, government run universal health care would be a huge improvement over the totally corrupt system we have now.”
Personally, I find both systems(socialized and the US system) to be majorly flawed. Socialized medicine works better in some countries than others but it has it’s share of problems such as long waits, poor quality, though to what extent depends on the country. Here in the US, the quality is good but the costs of both medical care and insurance have gotten ridiculous and a lot of hospitals and doctors hugely double and triple bill and try to get as much out of the insurance company as possible. Frankly, what I think might be best is a system that is neither socialized like in Canada/Europe or what we have in the US but a third alternative. Perhaps a way where All Americans who are not on medicaid/medicare can get affordable private medical insurance free of their jobs and at the same time, massively expanding our system of free/sliding scale medical clinics and public hospitals for those Americans who are not eligible for medicaid and fall on hard times. Again, this will entail getting rid of the economically draining illegal/legal third world migrants.
Posted by at 5:09 AM on September 4
What these studies don’t take into account are lifestyles. One’s lifestyle, such as sexual practices, diet and other practices can drastically raise or lower your life expectancy. A poor diet, involvement in criminal behavior such as gangs, sexual promiscuity, how well you take care of your health, all help to determine how long you live. Also a person can have “universal healthcare” all day long but if you don’t bother getting checkups or lead a high risk life, you will still have a low life expectancy.
Posted by at 9:04 PM on September 4