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Is this America the Backward?
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When we look at the fierce debate over health care reform at a time when every other industrialized country has already achieved universal health care coverage, as well as a host of other issues where the U.S. lags behind other advanced societies, this question should come to mind:
Are we living in America the Backward?
In every other industrialized country, health care is a right, while here in the U.S. it is just another business. Elsewhere, universal coverage was achieved by eliminating the middlemen, the insurance companies, with the government funding health care. Meanwhile the U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other country, more than 45 million Americans are uninsured, and the U.S. ranks 42nd in the world in life expectancy.
As another example of the U.S. running behind the curve, there is the death penalty, which has been abolished in every other industrialized Western democracy. The federal government and 35 states have the death penalty on their books. Michigan, which was the first jurisdiction in the English speaking world to abolish the death penalty in 1846, is one of 15 states, as well as the District of Columbia, without the death penalty.
There have been 42 executions in the U.S. so far in 2009 and 37 in 2008, which ranks the U.S. among the top five countries in the world in executions. The other four are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, dubious company to say the least. But since we are only human, no criminal justice system is going to be perfect, and wrongful executions of innocent people have not only taken place but are inevitable, and they amount to legalized murder.
When it comes to gay rights, the U.S. military has the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, under which people joining the military are not to disclose their sexual orientation and will be discharged if they come out as gay, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $200 million. Yet every other NATO country except Turkey allows gays in their military.
Then there is the matter of economic inequality. In the U.S., the average company CEO is paid 400 times the amount earned by the average employee, compared to 28 times more in Great Britain and 17 times more in Japan. This pay gap has gotten worse in recent decades, for in 1980, American CEOs averaged 45 times more in income than their average employee, while U.S. poverty rates are now the worst in the industrialized world. It suggests a move towards the situation found in most Third World countries, where there are a few people who are very rich, a lot of people who are very poor, and not much of a middle class in between.
When progress has been made in the U.S., it has occurred in the face of massive resistance, as we now see with health care reform. Slavery was abolished in 1865, centuries after it disappeared in Europe, but only after a bloody Civil War. Legalized racism, banned in other advanced countries generations earlier, was wiped out by civil rights legislation in the 1960s, while racists fought tooth and nail to maintain the status quo.
Americans like to pride themselves on living in the richest country on the planet and claim that we have the best of everything. But such claims are far from reality. We should be more willing to take our cues from other societies that do a better job of taking care of their own, instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
