Sally
the US has the world's best medical facilities...and not so very far away, what have you?
See, Washington DC, Bethesda...and compare to the health/life choices of the not so well off in D.C.
As always, the gulf between the mostly very decent people of almost any nation, and how it's government ends up working in reality, is a gulf vast as the ocean.
Many fine people go into politics ot help thier fellow citizen, to better their nations...many are just lousebags or become so corrupted by all the mini-sellouts, there's nothing left of 'em inside and go whereever the power/money cal.
As noted elsewhere, big part of problem is that Humans in groups *SUCK*.
Capitalism, Communism, Socialism all work well on small scale and with decent folk, scale 'em up and they inevitably become monsters. I can prove that too if any need
Even Adam Smith warned about taking it too far...but that inconvenient bit of wisdom got ignored, sigh
The USA, richest mightiest warrior nation on the planet, enough nukes to turn much of a continent into molten glass and mansions that would make a Doge of old green with envy...has about 40% of it's people medically uninsured...so you can have, like in "Developing Nations", folk living in squalor near others living in palaces.
The tragedy and waste of that is apalling.
We on this side of the Pond are not "better", we've just learned more, after very very ugly horrors we've oftne done to ourselves.
Took the obscene atrocities of World War2, on our own soil or nearby or done by us, to "bitchslap" us into trying ot behave more like sane, caring adults, in a national level. That's the difference.
Americans are usually the kindest, courteous folk you can meet
But at a national level, it's still like the 1800s, look at current insane partizanship at a time when the nation desperately needs good governance, ugh.
An important and very heinous bit of law in late 1800s USA, set us down our current catasrophic road, to whit, giving corporations some rights as if they were "real individuals".
Complex, but ended up letting corporations running totally out of control. Hence, monsters like UNUM came about.
(and as often the case, us in the UK started the ball rolling, lol. Al-Qeda eventually came about because of of British greed in the 1700s, no kidding)
A long standing problem in US was (don't know if still true) because of the bullcrap of out-of-court-settlements, negligent doctors could get their misdeeds hidden, and, if exposed, merely move to another state and start again.
UK learned 300 years ago that "fire insurance" companies were burning out folk to make them join up, and other heinous crimes! (again, no kidding)
Alas, IMHO, pained opinion, people in large groups, like nations, never ever learn any way but the very hard way.
An odd part of this is the US government covered up much of the horrors of the nuclear bombings on Japan, until a few years ago they'd managed to keep footage shot by the nation's own experts, secret.
Point being was those lunatics didn't want their own people ot grasp the real horror of what would happen if nuclear war occured, as they wanted a huge nuclear arsenal for many resons, one being greed as it made vast fortunes for some in business,and a complaining/scared Public was not wanted, so they censored out the atrocity that is nuclear warfare.
See the manically gleeful bomb test films of the 50s/60s, and how they often grossly distorted the resulting destruction they'd cause. "City buster" thermo-nukes do NOT "merely" cause 100,000 deaths, jebuz
and yes, I knwo what the Rusians did too, Tzar Bomba was one of the "cleanest" nukes ever built, but Sakarov turned against the damn things after he realized the fallout would kill 500,000 people over the centuries the radionucliedes existed, you'd just never see it, tiny tiny rise in cancer etc worldwide.
many years later, President Reagan didn't go to any of his nuclear briefings due to dread and ingorance of the reality (not exactly a light burden to bare for any person after all, ick!), and madmen on his own side were pushing for nuclear confrontation, so he finally went to a briefing, and was horrified to learn that at minimum, expected US casualties would be 110 million.
he could see the insanity in that, and he sought out Gorbachev to pull back from that abyss. Freaking nutcase "Hawks" never forgave him for that...jeesh, see "ABle Archer" and how we all nearly went up in smoke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
I'm explaining this because as a nation, the USA has never been "massacred", seen it's major cities wiped out by invaders etc. So it's people still don't grasp at a national level (not individuals, the general broad public and how they react en masse' I'm talking about)
Note how 9/11 vastly shocked and changed perspectives, an atrocity on massive scale, but it was an singular atrocity...compare it to the Rape of Nanking, Seige of Leningrad, Warsaw Uprising, London Blitz, firestorm bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo...
those huge atrocities and war carnage altered the way entire societies looked at things, and part of that became drive for better social and medical care.
America has been spared carnage so far, thank goodness, but it's left it "weak" as a "coherent nation" And has thus been exploited by sociopathic ratbags like UNUM.
GI's returning form Europe and the Pacific did bring some of this realization back, but the nation itself hadn't suffered like that and so the leasson wasn't learned en masse.
The USA is too big to have a single body like the NHS, heck the NHS is too big, more autonomy is needed, but the US desperately needs a coherent, single health care social
outlook, cna't force it on people, they have to learn, and they'll learn the hard way, alas. Not going to be long before only the very well off can afford medicla insurance in the USA, 30 years at most.
In simple terms: The quality of the USA's citizens as decent Human Beings, great expertize of the nation's medical experts etc mean nothing, when ratbags like the pharma and insurance corps can exploit the sick and dying for vast profit. Until folk learn that health cannot be about profit, that we're all connected....then it will inevitably get ugly.
Please go see the scale of profits for pharma and insurance corps and see why we folk with ME are being silently slaughtered by deliberate neglect. Sums of money involved are so vast, so intertwined with government that's then terrified of being caught out at this evil, that they will kill or ruin anyone who threatens that.
We are an "inconvenience" that may burst the Publics' bubble of perception, so we must be made "untermensch"
Er, sorry for droning on so long