This Pandemic and Male vs Female Leadership

 Compare. What does that tell you?

This is also playing out, statistically and factually, I believe, between Kansas and Missouri just now with Kansas' Governor Kelly vs Missouri's Governor Parson, too.

On Facebook, search and join at More Women Need to Lead the World.

Health Care in America

From the New Zealand Nurses Organisation on Facebook. 

An American in our health care industry visits that country.

Socialism or America's Capitalism?

In the ever-raging and ongoing battle of what's better? Capitalism or Socialism, I offer you today the Legatum Prosperity Index of world nations for 2015.

Britain leapfrogs Germany in list of world's 

most prosperous

Note two things, ladies and gentlemen.

The US is not "NUMBER ONE!"

And the top nine nations are Socialist.


Huh.

America? Number 1?

"WE'RE NUMBER 1!"

and 

"USA! USA! USA!"

Remember those?  Remember all that?

A new report was just issued, pretty much turning all that on its head:

Global Rankings Study Depicts an America in Warp Speed Decline

From access to healthcare and education, gender equality, attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, the U.S. looks like a second-rate nation.

A bit about the study:

Harvard business professor Michael E. Porter, who earlier developed the Global Competitiveness Report, designed the SPI. A new way to look at the success of countries, the SPI studies 132 nations and evaluates 54 social and environmental indicators for each country that matter to real people. Rather than measuring a country’s success by its per capita GDP, the index is based on an array of data reflecting suicide, ecosystem sustainability, property rights, access to healthcare and education, gender equality, attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, religious freedom, nutrition, infrastructure and more.

The index measures the livability of each country. People everywhere depend on and care about similar things. “We all need clean water. We all want to feel safe and live without fear. People everywhere want to get an education and improve their lives,” says Porter. But economic growth alone doesn’t guarantee these things.

Some of the indictments findings:

• While the U.S. enjoys the second highest per capita GDP of $45,336, it ranks in an underperforming 16th place overall. It gets worse. The U.S. ranks 70th in health, 69th in ecosystem sustainability, 39th in basic education, 34th in access to water and sanitation and 31st in personal safety.
• More surprising is the fact that despite being the home country of global tech heavyweights Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and so on, the U.S. ranks a disappointing 23rd in access to the Internet. “It’s astonishing that for a country that has Silicon Valley, lack of access to information is a red flag,” notes Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress Imperative, which oversees the index.
• the U.S. remains in first place for the number of incarcerated citizens per capita, adult onset diabetes and for believing in angels.
• New Zealand is ranked in first place in social progress. Interestingly, it ranks only 25th on GDP per capita, which means the island of the long white cloud is doing a far better job than America when it comes to meeting the need of its people. In order, the top 10 is rounded out by Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Denmark and Australia.
• Unsurprisingly these nations all happen to rank highly in the 2013 U.N. World Happiness Report with Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden among the top five. So, what of the U.S? In terms of happiness, we rank 17th, trailing neighboring Mexico.

The article and author rightly point out that, what with so much of the nation's wealth going to the already-wealthy, the middle- and lower-classes and working class people are getting soaked while the rich get richer.

So what're ya' gonna' do about it?

Health care in America: most expensive, least healthy

U.S. Spends The Most On Health Care, Yet Gets Least June 23, 2010 by JULIE ROVNER Pretty much no matter how you measure it, our health care system stinks. Big money gets puny health care results in U.S. Once again that's the sobering conclusion of the 2010 version of the annual Commonwealth Fund comparison of the U.S. health system with those in other industrialized nations. This year the competitors were Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The U.S. finished last. To come up with the rankings, researchers surveyed both doctors and patients. The criteria comprised quality, access, efficiency, equity, whether people in each country lived long and productive lives, and how much each country spent per person on care. The researchers produced a spiffy interactive graphic to display the results. But the findings were strikingly similar to those from surveys done in the previous four years. The U.S. spends more — much more — on health care and gets much less value for those dollars. Overall, the winner in this year's contest was the Netherlands. Interestingly, perhaps, it's a nation that doesn't have a government-run system, but instead achieves universal coverage with an individual insurance mandate, much like the one recently passed by the U.S. Congress. The Dutch were first in access, first in equity, and second in quality of care. The U.S., by contrast, was last in every category except quality, where it was second to last, squeaking in ahead of Canada. At $7,290 in annual spending per person in 2007, the U.S. also dwarfed second-place Canada at $3,895 and third-place Netherlands at $3,837. About the only good news for America, said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis, who was also the study's lead author, is that the new health law could put the U.S. on a path towards improvement. Link to original post: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/06/23/128027472/survey-says-u-s-health-system-sicker-than-most-other-nations?sc=17&f=1001

Guess who's not in the top ten of countries to do business

Yeah, it's us.

The US.

According to The World Economic Forum and their recent study, the US is no way in the top ten countries in which to do business, released yesterday.

Published for the third year in a row and covering 125 economies worldwide, the report presents a resource for dialogue and provides a yardstick of the extent to which economies have in place the necessary attributes for enabling trade and where improvements are most needed.

Check out the top ten:

1. Singapore
2. Hong Kong
3. Denmark
4. Sweden
5. Switzerland
6. New Zealand
7. Norway
8. Canada
9. Luxembourg
10. Netherlands

Beat out by Luxembourg.

Who'd have guessed?

The US? 19th.

We're not number one in this category, either.

Deal.

Link to original post:
http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/GlobalEnablingTradeReport/index.htm

US shut out of "Top 10 Cities" ranking

US "the best"?

The Economist Intelligence Unit doesn't think so.

Their survey "ranked 140 cities on 30 factors such as healthcare, culture and environment, and education and personal safety, using research involving resident experts and its own analysts" and decided the US doesn't have one city in the top ten.

Ouch.

Following is a list of the top 10 most liveable cities as ranked by The Economist:

1. Vancouver, Canada

2. Vienna, Austria

3. Melbourne, Australia

4. Toronto, Canada

5. Calgary, Canada

6. Helsinki, Finland

7. Sydney, Australia

8. Perth, Australia

9. Adelaide, Australia

10. Auckland, New Zealand

Neighbor Canada, however (you know the one--"Socialist Canada", the one with mass transit and national health care for all?) has 3 cities in the "top ten."

More ouch.

Between this and health care (we rank 37th in mortality rates, internationally, folks), we just keep getting put in our place, so to speak, don't we? So much for that "we're number one!" crap, huh?

The good news?

We didn't have any cities in the "bottom 10", either.

Thank goodness for that silver lining.