America prides itself for its healthcare system - among the world's best. This is being challenged by small insects - bed bugs. The blood sucking critters are infiltrating hospital bed linens and attacking patients who are already suffering from medical problems. Infection control and quality departments are working overtime to resolve these problems. I wonder how long it will take before they are able to resolve the issues.
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Having lived in the US for over 4 years I have come to understand several nuances of this society and culture. The infrastructure such as roads, parks, libraries, sporting arenas, etc are astounding and accessible to everyone. These are important amenities for the citizens but there is one more important need that remains largely unfulfilled is healthcare. There is pretty much no government hospital in the US. If you are one of the 50 million odd people who don't have health insurance then god help you if you fall sick. A simple emergency room visit could run into couple of thousand dollars and that is serious money for the average middle class family in the US.
While browsing the internet I came across an article titled Iconic skier’s death points out U.S. health gap which gives some hard facts about the health gaps in the US. According to the article over 700,000 families file for bankruptacy in the US every year because of healthcare bills. This includes several senior citizens who don't have any income other than social security and savings, they end up having to sell/ mortgage their homes to pay medical bills.When I was in middle school I had read the story about a homeless man in New York who tries to go to jail so he can spend the winter away from the biting cold. His rationale that he would be indoors, provided with a warm bed and hot food during the period of winter and then he could come back and live off the streets of New York. I had laughed off the story then, but now I realize that this is precisely what happens to people who end up in prison in the US. They get free housing, food and healthcare. After coming to America few years ago I am reading more and more news reports of actual people employing this method to get their basic needs fulfilled.
The latest example example is a 59-yr-old man from North Carolina, who made headlines on MSNBC recently. According to the news report this guy robbed a bank of $1 and waited patiently in the lobby for the police to arrive and arrest him.
Why did he do that? So that he could get his health problems taken care of and then have a roof over his head for the next couple of years. The man with no job, no insurance and dwindling savings and increasing age decided to commit a crime and get arrested. This way the state/ nation/ government will take care of him for the next couple of years by which time he will be eligible for social security/ old age pension of the federal government.
This is bound to happen in the exploitative capitalistic society that the US has evolved into. Where hardworking employees get 3-6% annual raises while CEOs get at least 24% raises and millions in bonuses. The employees, driven by poverty and desperation when they get old and infirm will resort to this kind of practices in order to barely stay alive.
I wonder if American society will ever change....
The internet is a huge repository of information. How much of it can be considered knowledge is a big question. General searches will throw up millions of websites that contain related data. It is very difficult to find authentic, relevant and correct information/ data/ knowledge on the subjects we are searching for. Looking at this chaos entrepreneurs have come up with their solutions. One of the recent developments is the springing up for websites which contain articles on various subjects.
For example a search on Health Weight Loss would yield thousands of responses on a search engine. But by visiting this dedicated site which contains articles by experts on the related subject it would be lot easier to find the information we are looking for.
One might argue that there are so many websites that contain articles on all subjects, what is the big deal about another one that is joining the web. Well I agree that there are several websites that features articles on various subjects but how many of them feature articles that are written by experts? How many feature articles with references and further reading on the research?
These are some of the things one needs to look for while looking up for an article base on the internet.
I found this news article on MSNBC. I must say that I am quite sure that this survey doesn't reflect the ground reality of the state of nations across the world. I say this because I have several questions about the survey. The study was conducted with only 3,100 respondents, in a world of 6 billion people, and several million living as expatriates in various countries this number is just too small to be of consideration. Second even among the nations studied the number of respondents differed. For example only 35 respondents were surveyed in Bahrain (ranked 1), while more than 450 people were surveyed in UK.
The media is calling the results surprising, but I call it fixed for one of the two reasons. Either HSBC has some vested interest in promoting Bahrain as a great country for expatriates or someone among the researchers want to aggressively market Universal Healthcare proposed by Obama Administration. Most of the respondents from Bahrain praised the public healthcare system highly.
