<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/fashion/sundaystyles/07friendss.html>
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18995>
The kicker is that life in the US is so vile and stress-filled now that even if you as an American have lots of money you can expect to have worse health than citizens of less backward societies:
May 5, 2006
Our Sick Society
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Is being an American bad for your health? That's the apparent implication of a study just published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
It's not news that something is very wrong with the state of America's health. International comparisons show that the United States has achieved a sort of inverse miracle: we spend much more per person on health care than any other nation, yet we have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canada, Japan and most of Europe. ...
The new study, "Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England," doesn't resolve all of these questions. Yet it offers strong evidence that there's something about American society that makes us sicker than we should be.
... [T]he study concludes that "Americans are much sicker than the English." For example, middle-age Americans are twice as likely to suffer from diabetes as their English counterparts. That's a striking finding in itself.
What's even more striking is that being American seems to damage your health regardless of your race and social class ... Americans are so much sicker that the richest third of Americans is in worse health than the poorest third of the English. ...
[One possible explanation] ... is that Americans work too hard and experience too much stress. Full-time American workers work, on average, about 46 weeks per year; full-time British, French and German workers work only 41 weeks a year. ... Maybe overwork, together with the stress of living in an economy with a minimal social safety net, damages our health as well as our families....
Carl