Mary Robinette Kowal tweeted about her experience using the healthcare system while living in Iceland. As and American, she was completely baffled by the availability and affordability of medical services. Iceland has universal healthcare, among the best in the world. Their healthcare system is mostly paid for by taxes and a large portion of government spending is on healthcare. Iceland has almost no private health insurance and no private hospitals. This is the way it could be in other countries if we valued health over profits:
Source: Mary Robinette Kowal
(via: Cheezburger)
Welcome to the world of countries that actually believe in medical care as a human right – which is to say, most of us.
Americans like to think and believe that they live in the greatest country in the world. Sorry not sorry, but that just isn’t true. They live in the RICHEST country in the world – and it’s a country that got rich by being viciously exploitative of absolutely everyone, including its own citizenry.
When the majority of your country’s adult population (54%) is not functionally literate above a fifth-grade reading level, you don’t live in a great country. When the wealth of that country means that absolutely everyone SHOULD be fully literate, and yet the majority of the citizenry aren’t, then you live in a very bad country indeed.
America is swimming in wealth – as already stated, it’s the richest country on the planet. And yet, its citizens can’t get access to decent healthcare without paying through the nose for it. Worse, they can easily be bankrupted for life by a single random and unexpected medical incident. They’re poorly educated; they’re racially divided; they’re lied to en masse by their media, which has abandoned the idea of fair play; their political system has allowed the rise to power of the worst kind of human beings imaginable. There really is no metric besides national wealth by which the USA can in any sense be considered a great nation. But still the lie is told, in the name of patriotism.
I would recommend that EVERY American start asking very serious questions about what rights are vouchsafed to the citizens of other countries by their governments, and then start DEMANDING that those rights be granted in the USA; and moreover, that they be worked in perpetuity into your national Bill of Rights. Because you Americans have absolutely no idea just how severely short-changed you are in comparison to the citizens of other countries where your individual rights (to education, to housing, to healthcare and to so many other things) are concerned.