Thanks to the Associated Press, our national egos can rest uncomfortably knowing that our health score as a nation continues to plummet.  You’d think that at over $2 trillion in health care expenditures nationally or nearly $6000 per capita, the score card would be better, but we have now dropped to 42nd in life expectancy worldwide.

Drunk drivers took the lives of almost 17,000 on the roads, and an estimated 510,00 are injured annually from alcohol related accidents. That works out to about one person per minute. Another part of the problem may be because we have so many guns. Every year it is estimated that more than 30,000 people are shot to death in murders, suicides, and accidents while another 65,000 suffer from gun injuries in the United States.  Defective automobile tires may have killed about 103 people over a number of years, but firearms kill about 85 people every day in this country.  How about obesity? The AMA estimates that nearly 300,000 people are dying annually due to obesity.

We may also rank 42nd because we have not used enough sun screen, have had too many household accidents and because the vast majority of medical centers are not dealing with their infection rates.  (The national average is a 9% infection rate, our medical center has been below 1% for nearly a decade.  They can be controlled.)

The bottom three spenders in healthcare dollars annually are the United Kingdom, Japan and Finland and Finland, Luxembourg and the U. K. are at the bottom as a percentage of GDP.  Guess what countries are included in the list that do better than the United States?  Remember, 41 countries are helping their citizens live longer than us and a few include: Finland, Luxembourg, Japan, the United Kingdom and Cuba?

The AP article pointed out that the country with the longest life span was Andorra?  Andorra is a tiny country between France and Spain where the people live nearly seven years longer than us.  Of course, the contrast to Andorra is Swaziland where the average person lives to be about 34.

Interestingly enough, after having spent time in Europe recently, It seems relatively apparent to me that the reason we are under performing so dramatically is that we don’t invest in preventative care, don’t really embrace public health and have never had a health policy for this nation.  Only about 4% of our trillions goes to prevention in this country.

Please forward this blog to our public officials.