Opinion - News Analysis   

U.S. slumps in global development table

Despite spending $230m an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy.

These are some of the startling conclusions from a major new report which attempts to explain why the world’s number — one economy has slipped to 12th place — from second in 1990 — in terms of human development.

The American Human Development Report, which applies rankings of health, education and income to the U.S., paints a surprising picture of a country that spends well over $5 billion each day on healthcare — more per person than any other country.

The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It shows each of the 11 countries that rank higher than the U.S. in human development has a lower per-capita income.

Those countries score better on the health and knowledge indices that make up the overall human development index (HDI), which is calculated each year by the United Nations Development Programme. And each has achieved better outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and longevity, with less spending per head.

Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans.

There are also wider differences, the report shows. The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years.

One of the main problems faced by the U.S., says the report, is that one in six Americans, or about 47 million people, are not covered by health insurance and so have limited access to healthcare.

As a result, the U.S. is ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants surviving to age one. The U.S. infant mortality rate is on a par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia and Poland. If the U.S. could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday. “Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it,” said the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Talk to Iran
Worrying phenomenon
Deepening divide in Jammu and Kashmir
Nelson at ninety
U.S. slumps in global development table
Stifling the spirit: my naani and 61 years of anguish
Bio-fuel producers hit back at OPEC
Politics of the deal
For and against

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu