America: We're Exceptional, All Right

Professor Reich came out with this video this week on his YouTube channel. He always gets me thinking.



Then there's this important to me, anyway, article from yesterday's New York Times.

The U.S. Is Lagging Behind Many Rich Countries

The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.

But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.

And this.

Health Insurance Is Broken

...Nothing illuminates the problems with an employer-based health care system quite like massive unemployment in the middle of a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease outbreak. For one thing, uninsured people are less likely to seek medical care, making this coronavirus that much more difficult to contain. Also, people with chronic or immune-compromising medical conditions are particularly susceptible to this new contagion — which means the people most in need of employer-sponsored health benefits are the same ones who can least afford to return to work at the moment.

“The pandemic has amplified all the vulnerabilities in our health care system,” says Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, including “the uninsured, racial disparities, the crisis of unmanaged chronic conditions and the general lack of national planning.”

So there's just a short list of articles that I think are important to us, to Americans, to the entire nation, along with this one video from Professor Reich.

We have fixing to do, America. Let's get out, vote, vote blue and get to the hard work of more justice and equality.

It will make us all, it will make the nation, stronger.