> living standards fall well below Mississippi’s
GDP is not a measure of living standards. The NHS alone puts even the poorest Brit's living standards above Mississippi.
GDP is not a measure of living standards. The NHS alone puts even the poorest Brit's living standards above Mississippi.
You're right that GDP is not a measure of living standards. But neither is saying "NHS" a measure of living standards. Do you actually have a measure you could refer to in order to prove the article wrong?
For instance, if you cut preventive healthcare for younger parts of the population that will take longer to manifest.
I wish there were more modeling tools available to run what-if simulations on public data.
That being said, a relatively large proportion of US GDP is driven by healthcare, which is normally measured at cost in the UK and Europe.
But neither private insurance nor hospitals have any incentive to operate preventatively because insurance can just increase premiums and everybody happily makes more money... Some might observe how that also increases the GDP...
The USA doesn't do much of that though. It prefers medical care.
(E.g., adding a dose-dependent sin tax on food-like substances with added sugar, subsidizing real food for those on SNAP. Unpopular because who doesn't want their simple carbs?)
America does a lot of that, often quite well. It just isn’t provisioned equally, geographically or class-wise.
The only other thing I can think of that would affect state wide obesity is food security and quality. Proper healthcare would be my first pick for fixing obesity.
1/10th the population of Mississippi does not have health insurance.
55% of adults in Mississippi over 65 have lost 6 or more teeth. In the UK it is about 45%.
An even stronger case is pointing out that Japan has a lower GDP per capita than Mississippi. But walk around Japan and try to claim that it's "poorer" than even a wealthy state in the US.
Ok and then go into the average person's living quarters.
There are many non-trivial differences that make these comparisons complex; GDP is about as good as you can get.
The nice things about a small town is our edge cases aren't far from our non-edge cases so we can offer things like pickup/dropoff at home or serve them normally and not add much to routes. It was such a godsend when my mom was dying of cancer. Not sure the schedule would represent that as it is an off schedule/off published route service.
> The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
This figure is from an article in the Times, and has no connection to official NHS figures. The Times just guessed how much it might be, and reported it as fact. Then, since The Times is a paper of record, other news outlets have run with it.
You misspelt "is the paper of Rupert Murdoch".
NHS dentists are scarce for policy reasons that are inexcusible. But private dental care here is not actually particularly expensive unless you want it to be, and it is good.
(Again, don't imagine that "private healthcare" in the UK is expensive in the way it is in the USA).
We have our problems and they are escalating in some ways, but my main issue with this article is that again US writers tend to assume that words and terminology have their US meaning and broader connotations.
Standard of living comparisons that use US concepts (car ownership, air conditioning ownership, even in the recent past comparing how many people dry their clothes outdoors, which is common American poverty indicator) just cannot capture the nuance in a way that makes sense.
On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.
That is to say, private care is often available in the West. It just comes with a hefty price tag.
https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/how-to-find-an-nhs-...
Now 600 people is a lot smaller than 60 million, I don't doubt there are people who have pulled a tooth out, but to get those sorts of figures, you'd have to count all the kids who pull out a tooth with a bit of string to get £1 from the tooth fairy.
This isn't a correct characterization of US healthcare either. No one is denied lifesaving care due to inability to pay by law. In fact 92% of Americans have some kind of health insurance. Of the ~8% who are uninsured, yes many do defer routine medical care which may lead to adverse long term effects. Its a real problem. However ~70% of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid, subsidy, or employer insurance, so there's room to improve on getting those people signed up.
Unlike the NHS.
> However ~70% of the uninsured are eligible for Medicaid, subsidy, or employer insurance, so there's room to improve on getting those people signed up.
I’d love if our government saw “room to improve” there instead of doing the exact opposite and working overtime to reduce the number of fully insured people.
https://thenationalpulse.com/2026/06/09/emergency-room-delay...
if you don't maintain per capita GDP, you will not be able to maintain living standards.
It's an eye-catcher, but obviously fallacious - the usual counter has been to point out the life expectancy difference of 10+ years.
Not that most people are particularly interested in nuance, smh
Simplistic thinking doesn’t help.
There is nothing definitively different about the US that prevents it from solving a lot of its social issues by doing the same as is done elsewhere. We know this because the social contract in the US post WW2 was quite similar to modern day Europe - e.g. 91% top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower [0].
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/15/bernie-san...
As someone who has been in and out, the poverty increase in Western Europe is astonishing. Whatever metrics I will show you, will meet something like "oh yeah but metrics X doesn't mean anything", but still, 20y ago buying a car was fairly standard. Going on holidays same. Let's not talk about buying a house. Nowadays, any of the above is considered as a sign of being "privileged", while it used to be middle-class before.