NEW YORK, July 22 (Xinhua) -- Despite spending more on health care than any other country, the United States has shorter life spans, higher rates of chronic disease and maternal mortality and fewer doctors per capita than its peers, reported The Atlantic on Thursday.
From 1933 to 2021, when the mortality rates of the United States are compared with the average of Canada, Japan and 16 Western European nations (adjusting for age and population), the U.S. started falling behind its peers from the 1980s onward, the report cited a Boston University (BU) research.
Were the U.S. "just average compared to other wealthy countries, not even the best performer, fully a third of all deaths last year would have been prevented," includes half of all deaths among working-age adults, said Jacob Bor, an epidemiologist at BU School of Public Health.
"These counterfactuals puncture two common myths about America's pandemic experience: that the U.S. was just one unremarkable victim of a crisis that spared no nation and that COVID disrupted a status quo that was strong and worth restoring wholesale," said the report.
The U.S. had the worst outbreak in the industrialized world, not just because of what the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations did, but also because of the country's rotten rootstock. COVID-19 just killed Americans in unusually large numbers, and at unusually young ages, it added. ■