A little fear is necessary to spur action; too much becomes paralyzing.
The poorest Americans have access to better medical care than the richest royals did a century ago.
A third of Americansavoid health care altogetherbecause they cant pay for it.
Minerva Jones and John Romulus Brinkley demonstrating their surgical procedure of grafting a goat’s testicular glands into a human adult male to enhance virility, at the Brinkley-Jones Hospital, in Milford, Kansas, in the mid-1920s. The procedure resulted in numerous deaths and more than a dozen lawsuits.Soibelman Syndicate Collection/Visual Studies Workshop/Getty Images
Three cheers for progress is something you’re free to say when that progress has benefitedyoumost of all.
It should be obvious that I reject this claim.
It is, of course, true in a very literal sense.
I would prefer to be born in 1988 than 1888.
We must envision the world as itcouldbe and measure the distance to the real.
In general, people dont die as soon as they used to.
Take infant mortality, for example: how many children die within a year of birth.
These rates have plummeted fromaround 70 per 1,000 births in 1925to5.6 in 2022.
But these gains are not shared equally.
In 2022, 10.9 out of 1,000 Black children died before their first birthday.
Thats more than twice the rate of white children 4.5 per 1,000.
Like nearly everything in American health care, health outcome disparity is distributed along the lines of race.
Or, more accurately,racism.
This gap has exploded over the past century.
Within this great wave of progress is countervailing destructive force to which onlysomeAmericans are victims.
Should they be reassured by a reminder that things were worse in the past?
Singh GK, Yu SM.
Infant Mortality in the United States, 1915-2017: Large Social Inequalities have Persisted for Over a Century.
International Journal of MCH and AIDS 2019.
On the other end of the stick, we have life expectancy.
Lets give it up for the status quo: life expectancy has increased from58 a hundred years agotoaround 78today.
Which, generally, is good news!
(A study of life expectancy in California during 20202021 saw the gap widen bytwo additional years.)
As in infant mortality, that gap has increased.
The gains of the wealthy come from the labor of the poor.
This life expectancy difference represents an aggregatetheftofmillions of years of life.
I maintain that this feat of engineering requires understanding thoroughly the blueprint by which the current world was constructed.
and yet this is precisely what the authors of progress fanfiction urge us to do.
It is possible to hold two thoughts at once.
