Comment by SR2Z
4 months ago
> We lag Europe by five years in life expectancy, despite spending 2x as much on healthcare.
Delete the bottom 5 states from the data (red Bible belt places) and suddenly this is no longer so true.
This trend holds for a lot of the things on your list: homicide rates, physical health, and so on. I'm not saying that these things you list aren't legitimate, but they are hardly pan-American.
The Deep South is a third world country that happens to be part of the United States, and there's not much the rest of us can or will do to fix problems that Southerners themselves have no desire to fix.
> Delete the bottom 5 states from the data (red Bible belt places) and suddenly this is no longer so true.
It's less true, but it's still mostly true.
Even the highest life-expectancy state in the US (California, at 80.9 years) isn't very good by rich-nation standards. It ranks below - deep breath - Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, French Polynesia, Andorra, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Italy, Spain, France, Norway, Malta, Sweden, Macau, the UAE, Iceland, Canada, Martinique, Israel, Ireland, Qatar, Portugal, Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Germany, the UK, Bahrain, Chile, and the Maldives, coming in just above Costa Rica.
> This trend holds for a lot of the things on your list: homicide rates, physical health, and so on.
Rhode Island is the US' safest state at 1.5 homicides per 100k per year. That's seven times Japan's, triple China, South Korea, or Italy's, double Malaysia, Norway, or the UAE, and 50% higher than Denmark, Iceland, or Belgium.
Colorado is the US' least obese state at 22.6%. That's triple South Korea, double France, and 50% more than Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands. (I'm including only high-income countries in this list, since many poor countries have low obesity because food insecurity is a problem.)
Even the most cherry-picked favorable stats are still awful. Does the South drag most US averages down? Yeah, but not by that much.