New Orleans Was Not an Anomaly -- U.S. Flunks Human Index Report

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Portion below; whole thing (via Palestinian Pundit) here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/17/internationalaidanddevelopment.usa

The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It shows each of the 11 countries that rank higher than the US in human development has a lower per-capita income.

Those countries score better on the health and knowledge indices that make up the overall human development index (HDI), which is calculated each year by the United Nations Development Programme.

And each has achieved better outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and longevity, with less spending per head.

Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans.

There are also wider differences, the report shows. The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years.

One of the main problems faced by the US, says the report, is that one in six Americans, or about 47 million people, are not covered by health insurance and so have limited access to healthcare.

As a result, the US is ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants surviving to age one. The US infant mortality rate is on a par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia and Poland. If the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday.

"Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it," said the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990.

"We get in this report ... an evaluation of what the limitations of human development are in the US but also ... how the relative place of America has been slipping in comparison with other countries over recent years."

The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.

In fact, the report shows that 15% of American children - 10.7 million - live in families with incomes of less than $1,500 per month.