Americans Concur: Our Health Care's Shit is Wack

[Source: A 2009 PEW poll, via good.is]

I come from a zany, imaginary place called Oklahoma. It's Texas' hat, if that helps you place it on the map. And while I'm atypical for Green Country [in that I bailed on it], I like to keep up with it's ever-developing oddness. I'm still fond of it in many ways.

This is native Oklahoman, Biker Fox.

I'm tellin' ya, this place is seriously, truly strange.

One of the things I care less for that my state of origin and adolescence produces is its politics. Oklahoma, being so make-believe, has a tendency to elect some whimsical, silly jackasses for its officials. Sadly, I'm not talking about Biker Fox - no one's elected him yet. Who I mean is, for one, Republican Senator Tom Coburn, the little and loudest among the many conservatives who claim that the U.S. has the best health care in the world [we don't, even the CIA says so]. A new poll from the PEW research center demonstrates well the partisan divide regarding accurate health care assessment:

The stark political divisions evident in the current debate over health care are mirrored in opinions about how the health care system compares with those in other industrialized countries. Most Republicans say U.S. health care is either the best in the world (28%) or above average (29%). Democrats largely take the opposite view, with nearly seven-in-ten saying U.S. health care is either average (35%) or below average (34%). Independents have more in common with Democrats than with Republicans in their evaluation of America's health care. Roughly six-in-ten say health care in this country is average (32%) or below average (29%) compared with other industrialized countries.

Conservative Republicans stand out in their positive assessments of U.S. health care. Two-thirds (66%) say America's health care is either the best in the world or above average. Just 39% of moderate and liberal Republicans agree. There is a smaller ideological divide within the Democratic Party -- with 75% of liberals rating U.S. health care as average or below average compared with 67% of moderates and conservatives." [source]

This is despite the fact that the poll also says most Americans disagree, correctly recognizing it as comparatively average or worse.

Big shocker that nationalist pride in a 2nd or 3rd rate health care system plagued with equal access, delivery, and funding problems is correlated to income bracket, in addition to political affiliation.

There are plenty of weird, wonderful, and outrageous things about both Oklahoma and the U.S. that are worth keeping around - state fairs, noodling, Gary Busey. These things are our shared heritage. But what ain't worth writing home about are the politicians, bureaucrats, and, if you're not among the rich elite, the doctors.

Unrelated: a song by Colorado shoegaze band Weed Diamond, called "Oklahoma".

Why Men Don't Have To Die So Early (But Do Anyway): Sex and Gender Differences in Longevity

[Source] Data from August/September, 2001.

In a recent course on gender role socialization, I had the opportunity to do a bit of research into longevity, which is becoming a pet topic of mine. In doing so, I found a lot of information about why men die earlier - about 5.4 years earlier in the U.S. - than women. It seemed silly for only one person, a professor, to read it after I'd spent time on it. Especially since there is so much that men (both very gender-typed ones and males who eschew the label) in the internet audience, can do a lot to change health trajectories and add years to life. In just one testament to the amount of control we really have over our health, Dan Buettner, a researcher who focuses on twins' health outcomes and longevity, says that people, regardless of sex, have it within their power to add as much as 10 years onto their lives. With that in mind, enjoy factsnacking on this bloggofied version of the paper.

[Oh, and please forgive the writing style; I'm a social sciences person and we can be a little stiff like that. This is by no means a complete or exhaustive review of the literature on this, just a lil' something to raise awareness. As with all my original content, comments enouraged]

For more on why gender roles do real, measurable damage on men and women, see William Pollack, A New Psychology of Men, and the wiki on gender roles.

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Despite the longstanding patriarchic belief that females are naturally the weaker sex, modern research clearly demonstrates that men have significantly more impairments in physical health behaviors, predispositions, and outcomes. The mortality rate in the U.S. for men is consistently 1.5 to 3 times higher until 85 years of age. Men make up 70% of heart attack fatalities before the age of 65 as well as the majority of cases of mouth, throat, skin, and urinary organ cancer (Kilmartin, 2010, p. 178-9). Typically, men die 5.4 years earlier than women and have a 43% greater age-adjusted mortality rate (class notes). This has been the status quo long enough that the New Oxford American Dictionary makes reference to women as exemplar for longevity: “the greater longevity of women compared with men” (Longevity, 2005). Why should it be the case that so many more men die at younger ages? Why is it that women have a lead in longevity? Some theorists point to biological rationales, saying that differences in specific attributes of physical development are the root cause. Others point to social and psychological sources for the gender gap. These explanations are not mutually exclusive; framing the issue as nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. In fact, the biological, socio-cultural, and psychological realms interact in a complex and recursive fashion.