In Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association a new study compared the health of middle-aged white people in America to those in England. It found that the US spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation, more than double what England spends per person. With all this money spent on drugs and care we should also be the healthiest in the world… right? Wrong. “At every point in the social hierarchy there is more illness in the United States than in England and the differences are really dramatic,” said study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in England.

The researchers even went through the trouble of creating a hypothetical world in which the English were as obese as Americans and had other similar lifestyle risk factors, to even things up. After those factors were adjusted in their model, and the numbers were calculated, America was still sicker. Only white American and English participants were included in the study to eliminate the influence of racial disparities in the results between the two countries. Still, the health of upper-income Americans resembled that of low-income Brits.

According to the World Health Organization, U.S. life expectancy ranks behind two dozen other countries. So much for the myth that socialized medicine is bad medicine. It’s no surprise to any American that we do a shitty job of providing primary medical care to citizens with low-incomes. Though, the good thing about this study is it proves the problem affects all social classes, not just the one our government doesn’t care about. Our fast food diet, work-related stress, tyranny of the pharmaceutical industry, and the hijacking of healthcare in general are my working theories for this asymmetry between countries. I’m sure you can find others.

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