April 13, 2010 - I will not ask you to buy into every statement made in this article. Yet it should make one take note. Most of us understand our country and our lives only at a local level. You understand your home and workplace and you understand paying your bills and family matters; at least most people do.
Good medical care is purely a function of the doctor. The infrastructure helps but in the hands of a competent doctor, service will be delivered. A country can afford to airlift a seriously sick patient to the best neurosurgeon and make that service cost effective. The short lesson is that quality of life is first a function of the quality of the people.
The first rule is that if you have money, it is possible to live in paradise almost everywhere today. You simply build it.
If you can earn a high enough wage and your skill set is not geography dependent, such as software engineering, you can land anywhere and quickly discover that your purchasing power far exceeds that in the United States.
The other important lesson is that professionals worldwide have usually trained in the West. They go home and set up shop and expect the same quality on which they trained. These are never grass shacks. I am very certain that I will not find any western trained barefoot doctors in China today.
This is all changing global culture and economics and making it easier for the rise of what might be called the global citizen.
This item is a wake up call that really is saying that our statistics hide the economic reality that our quality of life is distorted by structural issues that do not appear elsewhere.
Remember, we all know that the average economic indicator in the U.S. is superior in the U.S. Our problem is that an average hides the shape of the distribution curve, which may be quite disturbing. Thus a report by a biased observer who is in the field becomes useful in identifying issues.
My own efforts on the health care debates inform me that the Amerikan health care industry has been turned into a financial monopoly controlled by the insurance industry, with unfettered capacity to increase costs to the consumer and avoid providing service to the one third unable to pay. Competition is illusionary and is only for capturing paying victims of the system.
It ends up being a super tax on the middle class.