Vamos a Costa Rica

Planning on having a child anytime in the near future? You might want to relocate to Costa Rica if you do.

A recent opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof included the statement "... a child in Costa Rica born today is expected to live longer than an American child born today." Needless to say, this caught my eye. I've been to Costa Rica, and it's a great place to visit, nice people, but there is no way I would expect the life expectancy of an average Costa Rican to exceed that of someone born in America.

As it turns out, my initial expectations are, at least arguably, wrong (and Kristof is, at least arguably, correct). According to Globalis, the data for Costa Rica and the United States show Costa Rican child born today would be expected to live one year longer than a child born in the United States.

I qualified the above paragraph with the word "arguably" because I also found data showing life expectancy in the US is still greater than that in Costa Rica (although not by much, and the gap was closing). Still, the fact the most powerful, most advanced society on the planet, one which spends more money per person on health care than any other nation (and by a _wide_ margin) can boast of a life expectancy comparable to that of a 2nd-world nation says a great deal about both countries -- good things about Costa Rica, bad things about us.

The amount of money we spend on health care (over $7000 per person per year) is astonishing. The same Kristof column included the following factoid: "By next year, the average Fortune 500 company will spend more on health care than it earns in net income, according to Steve Burd, the head of Safeway. "

Our companies are being cannibalized by the need to provide health insurance for their employees, yet the return on investment is pathetic. We lag behind nearly every Western nation in standard measurements of health-care effectiveness -- infant mortality, percentage of insured, death in childbirth, etc. As our health care costs rise, and the number of people who are uninsured rises as well, the numbers can only get worse.

Despite this, any call for a single-payer system, or even for any significant revamping of the current, horribly inefficient, system is met with unyielding resistance. The system never changes, and things continue to disintegrate.

One of Benjamin Franklin's more famous quotes is "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Our current health care system is insane.