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Comment by vecinu | Hacker News Reader

Can we talk about the countries that are doing better than the US like Germany, Austria and Switzerland?

There are press articles about German people sending their parents in other countries[1], including in France's EHPAD [0] (elderly care).

And in France a month in elderly care (EHPAD) is currently around 1800 euro (it depends of the severity of the illnesses). This is nearly the mid salary in France!

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tablissement_d%27h%C3%A9...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/26/german-elderly...

Important to keep perspective: The study found ~10k eldery Germans living in Eastern Europe, and presumes more in other countries. Let's say 100k German seniors got deported by their family, living under questionable conditions.

That is not even remotely in the same ballpark as the ~70 million elderly unable to buy food in the US (cited in the OP). However it is true that there is an underlying problem in probably most of the West...

Can you clarify what you're referring to here? I don't know of anything suggesting those three countries in particular are uncharacteristically good at tackling homelessness or elder care.

We usually see the UN human development index cited for this. Which ranks countries based on life expectancy, education, as well as income. For the wealthy, my assumption is that you can buy your way to better education and life expectancy in the US. But for the middle class, you have no option but to slog through with services that lag many other developed countries [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_D...

I feel like people aren't really parsing my words critically.

I specifically did not say that the US was worse off than MOST countries. I said MANY countries.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-glo...

There are almost 200 countries. Many of them are quite poor compared to the "developed" world and prior to the pandemic had severe social and even humanitarian deficits. The pandemic has been devastating there also. But they were starting from a more challenged point.

The US is the richest country in the world, and even one of the wealthiest per capita, and significantly wealthier than Germany or Austria. That it’s not capable of doing as well as those two for all of its citizens is something that is a deep source of shame for me, an American living in Germany.

Germany still falls short for those at the bottom, but there are not several million people there who are unable to get a cavity filled or are terrified of the financial consequences of an ambulance ride.

Over half of them are island states or arbitrary n-gons colonial powers drew on the map some centuries ago.

If you base policy for "the greatest nation in the world" on such countries, well...

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