---

Health care and living standards
...Because I think that health care is a major, major portion of why we spend so much time complaining about not being that much better off than we were in the 1970s. Contra "99", health insurance hasn't declined dramatically since 1973. Since 1987--the earliest year for which I could quickly lay my hands on census data--the number of uninsured Americans has skyrocketed from 12.9% to 15.9%. If we look only at native-born Americans, the numbers have been essentially unchanged since 1993 (again, the earliest census figures I could find). In 1993, 86.3% of native-born Americans had health insurance; in 2005 that figure was 86.6%. All of the increase in uninsured has come from immigrants . . . and I don't think they'd be better off getting their health care back in Guatamala.

Americans are paying more for their health insurance, but that's because they're getting more. New drugs, new procedures, fancier hospital services (my American friends think that British hospitals look like something out of the third world; my British friends think that American hospitals are ridiculously fancy, like hotels.) We're living longer and dying of things that are harder to treat. We're keeping disabled kids alive at monumental expense. We're helping infertile couples have babies, burn victims rebuild their ravaged faces, cancer patients eke out a few precious extra weeks with their families.

These things cost phenomenal amounts of money. And with the exception of fertility clinics, we all pay for them a little bit at a time through our taxes and health insurnace plans . . . so we don't associate the higher price tag with the magical new medical services....