Why are we so unhealthy?

We've all heard about the French eating their butter and cheese and being healthier than Americans. We've all heard about Cuba having a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. In the U.S., we go to gyms, we buy diet foods, we spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the industrialized world, and we're sicker than every other industrialized country?

Krugman opines on why:

How much of America's poor health is the result of our failure, unique among wealthy nations, to guarantee health insurance to all? How much is the result of racial and class divisions? How much is the result of other aspects of the American way of life?

The new study, "Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England," doesn't resolve all of these questions. Yet it offers strong evidence that there's something about American society that makes us sicker than we should be.

he authors of the study compared the prevalence of such diseases as diabetes and hypertension in Americans 55 to 64 years old with the prevalence of the same diseases in a comparable group in England. Comparing us with the English isn't a choice designed to highlight American problems: Britain spends only about 40 percent as much per person on health care as the United States, and its health care system is generally considered inferior to those of neighboring countries, especially France. Moreover, England isn't noted either for healthy eating or for a healthy lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the study concludes that "Americans are much sicker than the English." For example, middle-age Americans are twice as likely to suffer from diabetes as their English counterparts. That's a striking finding in itself.

What's even more striking is that being American seems to damage your health regardless of your race and social class.

That's not to say that class is irrelevant. (The researchers excluded racial effects by restricting the study to non-Hispanic whites.) In fact, there's a strong correlation within each country between wealth and health. But Americans are so much sicker that the richest third of Americans is in worse health than the poorest third of the English.

So what's going on? Lack of health insurance is surely a factor in the poor health of lower-income Americans, who are often uninsured, while everyone in England receives health care from the government. But almost all upper-income Americans have insurance.

What about bad habits, which the study calls "behavioral risk factors"? The stereotypes are true: the English are much more likely to be heavy drinkers, and Americans much more likely to be obese. But a statistical analysis suggests that bad habits are only a fraction of the story.

In the end, the study's authors seem baffled by the poor health of even relatively well-off Americans. But let me suggest a couple of possible explanations.

One is that having health insurance doesn't ensure good health care. For example, a New York Times report on diabetes pointed out that insurance companies are generally unwilling to pay for care that might head off the disease, even though they are willing to pay for the extreme measures, like amputations, that become necessary when prevention fails. It's possible that Britain's National Health Service, in spite of its limited budget, actually provides better all-around medical care than our system because it takes a broader, longer-term view than private insurance companies.

The other possibility is that Americans work too hard and experience too much stress. Full-time American workers work, on average, about 46 weeks per year; full-time British, French and German workers work only 41 weeks a year. I've pointed out in the past that our workaholic economy is actually more destructive of the "family values" we claim to honor than the European economies in which regulations and union power have led to shorter working hours.

Maybe overwork, together with the stress of living in an economy with a minimal social safety net, damages our health as well as our families. These are just suggestions. What we know for sure is that although the American way of life may be, as Ari Fleischer famously proclaimed back in 2001, "a blessed one," there's something about that way of life that is seriously bad for our health.

I'd take it a step further than Krugman and say that the stress of a workaholic economy, combined with increasing job and overall financial security, is what's making Americans sick. Almost any job in the blue OR white-collar economy that doesn't involve hands-on contact can now be outsource. The result is that anyone employed by someone else goes to work every day in a constant state of fear of losing his/her job. For anyone who isn't a complete ostrich, there's no planning for the future, there's no hoping to do some home remodeling, no taking the risk of trading in the old car for a new one, no planning for a vacation, no hope of a better tomorrow, because we're all scramblling to show how indispensible we are, because we're all terrified of being perceived as disposable and of being the First To Go when the axe falls.

As a result, our lives revolve around staying employed. We eat in a hurry because eating takes time away from work. We put in extra hours and live in dirty houses because housework takes away from work. We neglect exercise because it takes away from work. We don't sleep enough because sleep takes away from work -- or we're too anxious about losing our jobs to sleep. So Amercans are on a treadmill of fast food, sleep deprivation, and constant gnawing anxiety.

Add to this the gutting of environmental regulations during the Bush Administration, and both the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the food we eat is becoming less safe. There's PCBs and radiation in the water and by extension the fish, there's mercury in the air, there's hormones in the meat and pesticides in the vegetables.

So is it any wonder that we're unhealthy?