Global
Study Shows Americans Dying from Preventable Causes at Shocking Rates
Americans are dying at a shockingly high rate from preventable
causes, found a first-of-its-kind global health study published late Thursday.
The new research demonstrates that despite the fact that the
U.S. has the largest economy in the world, healthcare for many of its residents
is woefully inadequate. The U.S. was tied with Estonia and Montenegro, far
below other wealthy nations such as Norway, Canada, and Australia, in the
study's ranking of 195 countries.
"America's ranking is an embarrassment, especially
considering the U.S. spends more than $9,000 per person on healthcare annually,
more than any other country," said Dr. Christopher Murray, senior
author of the study and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and
Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. "Anyone with a stake in
the current healthcare debate, including elected officials at the federal, state,
and local levels, should take a look at where the U.S. is falling short."
Progressives have long pointed out that the U.S. is one of the
only wealthy nations not to provide some form of
government-mandated healthcare, exacerbating inequality in healthcare outcomes.
The study published in the Lancet created a
Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index, "a summary measure based on 32
causes, that in the presence of high-quality healthcare, should not result in
death," the researchers wrote.
"Using deaths that could be avoided as a measure of the
quality of a health system is not new but what makes this study so important is
its scope, drawing on the vast data resources assembled by the Global Burden of
Disease team to go beyond earlier work in rich countries to cover the entire
world in great detail, as well as the development of a means to assess what a
country should be able to achieve," said Professor Martin McKee of the
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who participated in the
study.
Causes examined by the study include tuberculosis,
diarrhea-related diseases, lower and upper respiratory infections, leukemia,
breast cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, measles, tetanus, appendicitis, epilepsy,
diabetes, and others.
"The United States measures well for diseases
preventable by vaccines, such as diphtheria and measles, but it
gets almost failing grades for nine other conditions that can lead to
death," reported the Washington Post. "These
are lower respiratory infections, neonatal disorders, non-melanoma skin cancer,
Hodgkin's lymphoma, ischemic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease,
diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and the adverse effects of medical treatment
itself."
"What we have found about healthcare access and quality is
disturbing," said Dr. Murray. "Having a strong economy does not
guarantee good healthcare. Having great medical technology doesn't either. We
know this because people are not getting the care that should be expected for
diseases with established treatments."
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Roger Ailes Was One of
the Worst Americans Ever
On the Internet this week you
will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death
of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting
a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners.
What did Roger Ailes die of, aside from perfect timing
— Chase Mitchell
(@ChaseMit) May 18, 2017
When I mentioned to one of my
relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was,
"Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia."
Ailes has no one but his
fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of
people most responsible for modern America's vicious and bloodthirsty
character.
We are a hate-filled, paranoid,
untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is
slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large
part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.
"Trump in many ways was a
perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and
news in a sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves
pointed out, was terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line."
Ailes was the Christopher
Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist
looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant
piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment
of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the
factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans' worst
fantasies about each other.
Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly –
"I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made
mining terrifying story lines about the collapse of the simpler America such
viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their
childhoods.
In this sense, his Fox
News broadcasts were just extended versions of the old "ring around the
collar" ad – scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure
for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Fox was sold as the cure
for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white
picket fence.
Ailes launched Fox in 1996 with a
confused, often amateurish slate of dumb programs cranked out by cut-rate and
often very young staffers. The channel was initially most famous for its overt
shallowness ("More News in Less Time" was one of its early slogans)
and its Monty Python-style bloopers. But the main formula was always the
political scare story, and Fox quickly learned to mix traditional sensationalist
tropes like tabloid crime reporting with demonization of liberal villains like
the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton in particular was
a godsend for Fox. The first lady's mocking comments about refusing to stay home and bake
cookies – to say nothing of the "I'm not sitting here, some little woman,
saying 'Stand By Her Man' like Tammy Wynette" quote – were daggers to the
hearts of graying middle Americans everywhere. What's the matter, Ailes'
audiences wondered, with Tammy Wynette?
So they tuned into Fox, which
made ripping Hillary and other such overeducated, cosmopolitan,
family-values-hating Satans a core part of its programming.
But invective, like drugs or
tobacco or any other addictive property, is a product of diminishing returns.
You have to continually up the ante to get people coming back. So Ailes and Fox
over the years graduated from simply hammering Democratic politicians to making
increasingly outlandish claims about an ever-expanding list of enemies.
Soon the villains weren't just in
Washington, but under every rock, behind every corner. Immigrants were spilling
over the borders. Grades were being denuded in schools by liberal teachers.
Marriage was being expanded to gays today, perhaps animals tomorrow. ACORN was secretly
rigging vote totals.
Hollywood, a lost paradise Middle
America remembered as a place where smooth-talking guys and gals smoked
cigarettes, gazed into each others' eyes and glorified small-town life and the
military, now became a sandbox for over-opinionated brats like Sean Penn, Matt
Damon and Brangelina who used their fame to pal around with socialist dictators
and lecture churchy old folks about their ignorance.
The Fox response was to hire an endless
succession of blow-dried, shrieking dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and
Sing,who filled the daytime hours with rants about every conceivable
cultural change being the product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy.
Ingraham even derided muffin tops as
evidence of America's decaying values.
Ailes picked at all these scabs,
and then when he ran out of real storylines to mine he invented some that
didn't even exist. His Fox was instrumental in helping Donald Trump push the birther phenomenon into
being, and elevated the practically nonexistent New Black Panthers
to ISIS status, warning Republicans that
these would-be multitudinous urban troublemakers were planning on bringing guns
to the GOP convention.
The presidency of Donald Trump
wouldn't have been possible had not Ailes raised a generation of viewers on
these paranoid storylines. But the damage Ailes did wasn't limited to hardening
and radicalizing conservative audiences.
Ailes grew out of the entertainment world – his
first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike
Douglas Show – but he later advised a series of Republican
campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.
So when he created Fox,he merged
his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political
stagecraft.
The effect was to politicize the
media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to
cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted
specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media
landscape into political fiefdoms – Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc.
Ailes trained Americans to shop
for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political
spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product.
What most of us are buying when
we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a
reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the
version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to
nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we're wrong about
anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.
Moreover, Ailes built a financial
empire waving images of the Clintons and the Obamas in front of scared
conservatives. It's no surprise that a range of media companies are now raking in fortunes waving images of Donald Trump in front
of terrified Democrats.
It's not that Trump isn't or
shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now
a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up
on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more
advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides.
Trump in many ways was a perfect
Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and news in a
sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was
terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line.
And when Ailes died this morning,
he left behind an America perfectly in his image, frightened out of its mind
and pouring its money hand over fist into television companies, who are gleefully
selling the unraveling of our political system as an entertainment product.
The extent to which we hate and
fear each other now – that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was
more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours.
It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have
that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster!
© 2016
Rolling Stone
As Rolling Stone’s chief political
reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the
likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's
2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his
status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books
include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most
Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War,
Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting
Empire.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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