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January 12, 2005

That's it, I'm moving!

'95% of citizens to be covered by health insurance within 2 years'

So now, not only do nice Scandinavian countries have universal heathcare, but backwards Middle Eastern countries do too. It's so hard for me to understand why Americans don't want universal healthcare while so much of the rest of the world makes healthcare a priority. Everybody else seems to understand that it is important. . .

My libertarian friends would tell me that the quality of healthcare suffers under programs like this and yet Jordan has the best medical care in the region. Yes, I know it is the Middle East and that Iraq is not much for competition, however, Jordan's facilities are still amazing. I recently found out that the Mayo clinic has had international telemedicine projects with Jordan. This means that one of the best American medical facilities trusts them and partners with them! How can that be 'lower quality' healthcare?

Anyways, I really found this article interesting because Jordan is by no means a rich country and yet it prioritizes health care. It might also be interesting to think about the fact that Jordan has about 25 AIDS cases in the entire country and yet they see that number much too large. It seems to me that even though the Jordanian government isn't perfect according to the United States's standards, it still manages to care for its people. Some days, that is more than I can say about the United States government. . . and yet we are still so adament about exporting our form of Democracy.

Posted by rcollins at January 12, 2005 7:07 PM

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Comments

Rebecca - can you compare how much Jordan spends on health care and defence? Do they have a "welfare" system similar to other western nations?

Posted by: Paul Gutwin at January 13, 2005 10:04 PM

Some relevant data:

Jordan defense spending - $2043 million USD (2003) or 20.2% of GDP (source)

The most recent statistic on healthcare spending is posted by the WHO and shows spending of 9.5% of GDP - which with a 2003 GDP of $10.1 billion USD would be $960 million USD.

It seems to be harder to find a timely statistic on social welfare spending. A report published by UNPAN and CAIMED shows total social security expenditures of 8.9% of GDP in 1995. The report goes into depth on the welfare systems in place in Jordan. Note that there are a few more important statistics: 30% of the population is below the poverty line, and the country officially reports an unemployment rate of 16%, although the CIA factbook estimates it could be as high as 25-30%.

Here's one paper on the subject of Jordan as a welfare state: http://www.mevic.org/papers/welfare-state.html

Oh yes - just for comparison: The USA spends $370.7 billion (2003) on military expenditures, or 3.3% of GDP (2004) (source)

USA health care spending (2003):

Private sector: $913.2 billion
Public sector: $766 billion
Medicare: $283 billion
Medicaid: $267 billion
Total: $1679 billion - 15.3% GDP

It also seems hard to get a good number on "welfare" spending in the US, primarily because most statistics seem to include public health spending, which was not included in the Jordan number. Just for your information, Wikipedia reports a number from the OECD of "general government total outlays" (whatever that means) of 35.7% of GDP.

Please excuse my lack of citation of the above figures - I had included full links to all my information, but MT ate my HTML. So be it.

Posted by: Karl at January 14, 2005 9:02 PM

Wow, that's *ahem* very interesting. If so much of their GDP goes to defence - and they still can deliver high quality health care, with such a high unemployment rate, something is out of wack (either in Jordan or the US...).

We gotta do better here in the US. Like Becca says - it's hard to understand why American's don't act like they want health care for all.

Posted by: Paul Gutwin at January 14, 2005 9:40 PM