Evening Wrap

We know that the U.S. has the biggest, baddest collection of medical technology, institutions and professionals on earth. So why doesn’t the U.S. rank No. 1 in surveys of the best health care system? (We’re No. 18 in the annual World Population Review ranking.) Because our health care system is a disjointed, expensive mess that doesn’t always put patients first. Let’s review some recent examples.

Let’s start with arguably the only group in the country that never got the “nothing matters” memo: The U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which concluded its work Monday by referring former President Donald Trump to the federal Department of Justice for potential criminal charges.

Let’s start with some crabby news out of Alaska, where two prominent crab harvests were canceled in the wake of a prolonged marine heat wave that’s prevented ice from forming in the Bering Sea for two winters. The sudden environmental shift decimated populations of snow crab, forcing state officials to close the fishery for the first time ever. That cancellation coincided with the second consecutive closure of the Bristol Bay red king crab harvest due to dwindling population numbers, per the Alaska Beacon.

Specifically, we’re going to talk about school funding, which is always a nationwide disaster. Education dollars come mostly from state and local budgets, which vary widely from place to place. Rural cities, small towns and areas with high rates of poverty have less money to invest in education, so schools in those areas generally receive fewer dollars per student than districts in wealthier jurisdictions. (Even in the same district, low-poverty schools often get more money than high-poverty ones.) The financial disparity is a giant driver of achievement gaps, particularly between majority-Black and predominantly white schools.

From a global perspective, water supplies in the United States are fairly secure. This year, America ranked 26th among 180 countries in terms of safe drinking water and sanitation systems, up about two spots from 2012. Most of us probably haven’t considered this, because most of us — roughly 99.4% of Americans — have access to clean drinking water. That seems impressive until you calculate exactly how many people that excludes: About 2 million.

It’s a harsh assessment that’s supported by data. Here’s a recent example: Child poverty declined by 46% from 2020 to 2021, thanks mostly to the pandemic-era expansion of the federal Child Tax Credit. The change sent more money to more families, lifting an estimated 5.3 million people — and 2.9 million children — out of poverty. 

Let’s check in on Kari Lake, a MAGA Republican who’s made increasingly desperate attempts at relevancy following her loss in Arizona’s gubernatorial race a month ago. Her latest gambit: A lawsuit seeking to overturn the results of the election and hold a do-over on the basis of “intentional misconduct” in Maricopa County.

As ever in state politics, “work” is a relative term. The vast majority of state legislatures are adjourned, leaving just three (Michigan, New Jersey and Ohio) in regular session and another two (California and Florida) in special session. Lawmakers in other states are using their downtime in a variety of ways, ranging from banal session prep and transition planning to exceedingly dramatic legal wrangling and political bickering.

A fun thing about Democrats is that Democrats can’t have nice things. This has been true possibly forever (what is time), but especially since 2000, when poorly designed ballots placed a presidential election in the hands of a conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, which handed the presidency to the (Republican) guy who may not have actually won. This was par for the course for Democrats, who consistently win more votes than Republicans but have little to show for it. (Thank you, electoral college and partisan gerrymandering.)

To most of us, prisons and jails are a bit of a mystery. They’re tucked away in nondescript municipal buildings or in sprawling rural facilities, where public and media access is limited and strictly controlled. Most of the news that trickles out of the system is filtered through a state press shop, leaving it heavy on legal jargon but short on details. We know that the system is rampant with dysfunction, but we don’t really know what, if anything, is being done to fix it. In the United States, incarceration is simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible.

There are so many examples of Republican rhetoric manifesting into real-life consequences that I literally do not know where to begin. Remember when they spent decades trying to outlaw abortion without understanding abortion, only to be surprised by all of the negative impacts of outlawing abortion? Or when they baselessly attacked the integrity of American elections, only to be whisked to safety after their own voting base stormed the U.S. Capitol in the name of election integrity?

America’s health care system makes no sense. We are the richest country in the world, and also the only developed nation that does not provide universal health care to its citizens. We spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but we’re also one of the unhealthiest nations on earth. Every problem we have is at odds with everything we do to address it. American health care: The bureaucratic equivalent of the shrug emoji.