Poll shows Barack Obama is not Jesus, plus: US health care sucks

A new poll in the New York Times shows that Barack Obama has inexplicably failed to erase the legacies of slavery in the United States, and further, that he has consistently failed to turn concentrated sulphuric acid into a decent cabernet. Analysts are stunned by this new evidence that Obama is at best a demigod or saint and not a full-fledged deity capable of remaking the human soul if only suffering and brutality were not indispensable tools of god-administrated spiritual education.

The editorial policy of BTC News is to disparage the presumptive Democratic nominee at every opportunity, but even we are thoroughly taken aback that someone at the Times apparently thinks Obama could have healed, but somehow failed to, the wounds created by more than 150 years of slavery and nearly 150 years of racial bigotry on one side, and some 300 years of festering resentment and outrage on the other.

In other news, the US has fallen from 15th to 19th among 19 developed nations in at least one measure of a comprehensive survey of health care. For the math-challenged, this means that we’ve gone from near the bottom to on the bottom. Given our parlous economy, our near-feudal income distribution inequities and the consensus among Democrats and Republicans that health care reform must above all focus on the wellness of insurance company balance sheets, it’s possible that the next survey will skip the comparisons with other countries because they’re simply not fair.

The Commonwealth Fund study (Acrobat version here) includes more than 30 measures of “health care outcomes, quality, access, efficiency, and equity” in the US. The highest score possible for each measure is 100; the average US score is 69. The measure on which the US has dropped from 15th to 19th is “mortality amenable to medical care”, otherwise known as medically preventable deaths. On others, we were already bringing up the rear: more Americans than ever are uninsured or underinsured—75 million in 2007, as opposed to approximately none in the other 18 countries—and the divide between the rich and poor and the white and tinted on questions of quality of care and access to it are extreme.

Among the arenas in which the US lags behind most other countries is mental health care. The study found that only 69% of individuals suffering from major depression received treatment for it, with the treatment being in many cases inadequate. And that represents a significant improvement over the 2006 survey score of 65%. The authors estimate that adequate and universal treatment of the illness would save $2.2 billion each year in lost worker productivity, which phrase should be read according to your inclination.

That estimate seems low to us, but even if it isn’t, the total cost of all untreated mental illnesses is vastly higher: witness the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was spawned by a rather small group of delusional Americans whose enabled disabilities are costing us nearly $200 billion annually.

And that’s just the cash tax.

Readers who have trudged this far have probably told themselves that the un_Jesusness of Obama and the unholiness of the US health care system are painfully obvious. Well, yes: exactly.