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> living standards fall well below Mississippi’s GDP is not a measure of living standards. The NHS alone puts even the poorest Brit's living standards above Mi
by applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
> living standards fall well below Mississippi’s
GDP is not a measure of living standards. The NHS alone puts even the poorest Brit's living standards above Mississippi.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoA lot of fellow Eastern Europeans travel back home to get medical care. This is good testament about the quality of care and personal in UK - since ours are like take out of a horror movie
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- f6v 5mo agoEastern Europeans doing "medical tourism" is often powered by higher salaries in the West and lower living standards in the East. That's true not only for healthcare but for majority of services. You absolutely can get quality private care in the West - it's just much more expensive. The private care is also much less affordable for the locals in the East.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoSince when is NHS private care?
- bonzini 5mo agoThe three options are NHS, private local and private Eastern Europe. On the axes of fast, cheap/cheaper, near, you can pick two.
- f6v 5mo agoAt least in Germany, you can opt out for private health insurance. I don't know if that's the case in the UK. There're also many private hospitals in Denmark. And in the latter, you have right to get treated in those if there're no public healthcare options available in reasonable time. But both Germany and Denmark suffer from the same issues as the UK, of course. That is to say, private care is often available in the West. It just comes with a hefty price tag.
- Yizahi 5mo agoWhile true, isn't that a rich life benefit in general? E.g. Brits can choose (important hat they have options) to trade some time to get even cheaper and just as good healthcare services compared to Mississippians who don't have such an option at all. So an aggregated quality of life for Brits is even higher because of that.
- jtbayly 5mo agoBoth GDP and living standards are discussed in the article. The NHS is addressed near the beginning as proof of the deteriorating condition of living standards. 1/10th of the population are on a waiting list for care. 1/10th have done DIY dental work. You're right that GDP is not a measure of living standards. But neither is saying "NHS" a measure of living standards. Do you actually have a measure you could refer to in order to prove the article wrong?
- drcongo 5mo agoMy kids are very unlikely to get shot at school.
- bonzini 5mo agoConsidering Mississippi has 7-8 years less of life expectancy than the UK, the onus of proving who has better healthcare is probably not on the Brits.
- thatguy0900 5mo agoI don't think it's a matter of better or worse quality, the Healthcare being expensive and for profit in Mississippi leads to people just not going to the doctor at all
- bonzini 5mo agoWhat matters is the outcomes. If nobody is able to use a world-class healthcare system (for whatever reason, could be affordability as in the US or availability as in the UK), then as a whole it's as good as no healthcare.
- bborud 5mo agoTo be fair, meaningful changes to life expectancy numbers tend to take longer to manifest. For instance, if you cut preventive healthcare for younger parts of the population that will take longer to manifest. I wish there were more modeling tools available to run what-if simulations on public data.
- codeduck 5mo agoThe unfortunate thing is though that general medical care under the NHS is a complete postcode lottery - if you're lucky enough to be registered with a decent practice you're okay, if you're not you're screwed. On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.
- tajd 5mo agoYes, cannot say highly enough of the emergency medicine. Timely and effective.
- ch4s3 5mo agoI wouldn't be so sure about that. The article outlines how hard it is to get dental care in the UK, which just isn't going to be as difficult in Mississippi. Mississippi's Medicaid covers emergency dental care so it's available, you just probably have to drive, but that's true of most things in most of the US. The real healthcare issue in Mississippi is the shortage of providers, which is also an issue in most of the UK.
- NopIdoN 5mo agoEmergency dental treatment is available in the UK "within 24 hours or 7 days, depending on your symptoms." https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/how-to-find-an-nhs-dentist-in-an-emergency/ https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/how-to-find-an-nhs-...
- ch4s3 5mo agoThe article outline that 1 in 10 people in the UK have done DIY emergency dental care, wich suggests strongly that the availability is less good than advertised. In fact a large portion of the article is about growing NHS wait times.
- spacedcowboy 5mo agoI know about 6-700 people over here in the UK, I live in a poor-ish Northern town and I don't know a single person who's done "DIY dental care". Not one. Now 600 people is a lot smaller than 60 million, I don't doubt there are people who have pulled a tooth out, but to get those sorts of figures, you'd have to count all the kids who pull out a tooth with a bit of string to get £1 from the tooth fairy.
- ch4s3 5mo agoI didn't write the article. But it would be similar to me saying that everyone I know in the US has access to pretty good healthcare.
- greggoB 5mo agoThis comparison of the large Western European economies (most frequently Germany) to America's poorest state based on GDP-per-capita is all the rage on the US right at the moment. It's an eye-catcher, but obviously fallacious - the usual counter has been to point out the life expectancy difference of 10+ years. Not that most people are particularly interested in nuance, smh
- BoggleOhYeah 5mo agoSome people are just all-in on the moronic MAGA nationalism and refuse to earnestly engage with critiques of the US. America is always better than Europe, even when it's not.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- shermantanktop 5mo agoThere are also those who believe the opposite. They constantly point out Scandinavian countries as somehow having solved every problem that exists in the US…despite being very different in almost every dimension one can think of. Simplistic thinking doesn’t help.
- greggoB 5mo agoThe way I've seen Scandinavia referenced has been more of a counterpoint to dysfunctional aspects of the US having to be the way they are. There is nothing definitively different about the US that prevents it from solving a lot of its social issues by doing the same as is done elsewhere. We know this because the social contract in the US post WW2 was quite similar to modern day Europe - e.g. 91% top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower [0]. [0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/15/bernie-sanders/income-tax-rates-were-90-percent-under-eisenhower-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/15/bernie-san...
- CalRobert 5mo agoLife expectancy is complex and there's more to it than healthcare. Certainly habits, exercise, diet, etc. are a big part of it as well.
- indoordin0saur 5mo ago> GDP is not a measure of living standards. An even stronger case is pointing out that Japan has a lower GDP per capita than Mississippi. But walk around Japan and try to claim that it's "poorer" than even a wealthy state in the US.
- ecshafer 5mo agoJapan has less trading houses at increasingly high valuations to pump up their GDP.
- paytonjjones 5mo ago> walk around Japan Ok and then go into the average person's living quarters. There are many non-trivial differences that make these comparisons complex; GDP is about as good as you can get.
- inigyou 5mo agoGDP is one of the most meaningless ways to compare the standard of living in two countries. It can only compare their financial position and it's questionably good at that.
- Macha 5mo agoTokyo and Kansai, sure. But a lot of rural Japan is pretty clearly in line with rural US states.
- Yizahi 5mo agoSo the same quality and reach of the public transit in rural Japan and rural USA? The same percentage of net income spent on the similar healthcare procedures in rural Japan and rural USA? The same quality and percentage of net income spent on the education in rural Japan and rural USA? I have doubts.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo agoI live in a pretty rural, red small town USA and we have a great bus system. Disabled/elderly/sick can even call and be picked up in front of their home. Our library system is expanding in size and scope (they do a heritage seedbank now). Schools are tough to fund because the feds own most of the land and even though the deal was we lost tax revenue because federal land but that was made up for in logging/mining revenue the feds just stopped giving permits and screwed our community out of the jobs/promised revenue. Rural America isn't all the hellscape the internet pretends it is.
- this_user 5mo agoMaybe should actually read the article. > The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo agoIt is paywalled. I only had access to the first two paragraphs. Regardless, that description changes nothing. "The NHS is overburdened" is a problem, but it is still better than not having the NHS at all.
- cyberpunk 5mo agohttps://archive.ph/FMSfO https://archive.ph/FMSfO
- OtherShrezzing 5mo ago>The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care This figure is from an article in the Times, and has no connection to official NHS figures. The Times just guessed how much it might be, and reported it as fact. Then, since The Times is a paper of record, other news outlets have run with it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- GJim 5mo ago> since The Times is a paper of record, You misspelt "is the paper of Rupert Murdoch".
- 5mo ago
- grey-area 5mo agoTo make it worse, this is gdp per capita, a pretty worthless statistic. Someone else below points out the comparison with Japan.
- lucasRW 5mo agoIt's fascinating to see to what lengths people will go to maintain their denial. As someone who has been in and out, the poverty increase in Western Europe is astonishing. Whatever metrics I will show you, will meet something like "oh yeah but metrics X doesn't mean anything", but still, 20y ago buying a car was fairly standard. Going on holidays same. Let's not talk about buying a house. Nowadays, any of the above is considered as a sign of being "privileged", while it used to be middle-class before.
- inigyou 5mo agoThe same in the USA. The other day I saw someone claim that people have it better now because they have more phones and TVs, and that somehow outweighs not being able to afford cars and houses.
- anonymousiam 5mo agoAre you sure about that? https://thenationalpulse.com/2026/06/09/emergency-room-delays-in-britains-socialized-health-service-kill-300-patients-a-week/ https://thenationalpulse.com/2026/06/09/emergency-room-delay...
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 5mo ago>GDP is not a measure of living standards. if you don't maintain per capita GDP, you will not be able to maintain living standards.
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoHowever, GDP may be measuring the opposite of living standards. In the UK, the NHS will be effectively paying cost prices for healthcare (which is generally available free to the public), whereas Mississippi will presumably factor in expensive healthcare as part of the GDP. Higher GDP, but a lower living standard if you have very limited access to healthcare.