Word: americans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...your chapter about health and diets, I was shocked to learn that the average American's caloric intake isn't much greater than the average caloric intake in other countries. Apparently not. And yet we're significantly more obese. That may have something to do with the fact that we don't walk or bicycle as much. Also, the surprising thing is that we're quite a bit more obese than other nations, but we actually have fewer people in the "overweight" category...
Europeans have VAT and it's very, very high - in Nordic countries, it's somewhere between 20% and 25%. The average European pays a much higher percentage in overall budget every time they buy something, but European governments give it back in the form of social benefits. American social benefits tend to be limited to the poor, so there's a much clearer [wealth] redistribution through the tax system than there is in Europe...
What about health care? Is the U.S. health care system really that much worse than Europe's? There are basically three numbers that always come up when people talk about the American health care system: average life expectancy, infant mortality and the mount of money we spend per head. Average life expectancy is at the low end of the European scale. We don't do well in terms of infant mortality, either. [And] we spend almost twice as much per person in health care expenditure. Fifteen percent of Americans don't have any insurance coverage. That's undeniable...
...look at every other attempt to measure outcomes, the American health care system isn't doing that badly. In terms of heart disease or cancer rates, they're about the same as those in European nations. If you look at cancer survival rates, we do quite well. Our system may not be the best, but it's not the worst. It works fantastically inefficiently, in that it costs us twice as much as any other country to achieve roughly the same results. So not only do we have to expand coverage, but we have to cut costs at the same...
...while Obama leaves Beijing with little in the way of a diplomatic victory, Hu was able to win some acknowledgments from the U.S. Obama said the U.S. considers Tibet to be part of the People's Republic of China. While that is long-standing American policy, scholars could recall no point when a U.S. President has stated it publicly. Territorial questions like Tibet remain top priorities for China, and Obama's mention of that issue was a key win for Beijing. It's a sign that while China doesn't know how it wants to use its newfound clout...