Posted on 03/16/2020 12:37:09 PM PDT by daniel1212
The Italian healthcare landscape includes crumbling hospitals, doctors trained on books rather than patients, and per capita spending one-third that of the United States. And Americans like to say their medical care is the best in the world, while Italians consider their National Health Service to be hopelessly dysfunctional. (In 2000 the World Health Organization ranked the Italian system second-best on the planet. But that stellar rating was based solely on equality of access on the one hand and health outcomes such as life expectancy on the other, ignoring any on-the-ground realities in between: waiting times, emergency room efficiency, surgical statistics, etc.)
But here’s the rub: Italians are much healthier than Americans in terms of everything from overall health longevity, infant mortality, obesity, cancer, diabetes, suicide, drug overdoses, homicides, and disability rates. On many of those measures, they beat out the UK as well. How on earth do they do it?
In Italy, a National Health System funded by taxes and based on the British model succeeds in providing everybody with doctors’ visits, medications, testing, and hospital care at virtually no out-of-pocket cost...
In Italy prices are kept down by hard bargaining – emergency room care is free for serious cases, those deworming pills cost one euro total, and even the classiest private hospital is unlikely to run more than €500 a night....
In the US, the world’s most unequal country, the average income of the top 10 percent is 19 times the average income in the bottom 10 percent; in Italy that ratio is only 11 to one, with the UK halfway in between.
And Italian labour laws ensure that new parents can take time off to bond with their children without losing their job, sick people don’t have to drag themselves back to work prematurely, and retirement doesn’t equal poverty.
The salubrious Italian lifestyle does the rest. Even educated, insured, well-off Americans are sicker than their peers in other rich nations. The local version of the Mediterranean diet may be the healthiest in the world – rich in fruits and vegetables, low in animal fats. And it’s low on snacks and desserts as well, so only 10 percent of Italians are obese, compared with 27 percent of Brits and a whopping 38 percent of Americans....
Susan Levenstein is an American doctor who has been practicing in Italy for the past 40 years.
How many Americans in a lifetime need deworming pills?
Indeed.
And I think she is 70.
Well, if France is treating this as war, I expect to see Corona viruses marching through the streets of Paris in a matter of weeks.
I think she is 70 as well. I think she is also a progressive with tremendous faith in the wonderful Italian health system. But decided it was a lot better to attend conferences in the US than to stick around Italy.
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