SOC 490 week 3/week4

In our Universal Health Care, Ben Furnas says “The United States as a whole is performing well below the standards of health, efficiency, and care that are realistic and have been achieved in the most successful U.S. states and other developed nations” (p.27). Furnas says that one of the indicators of our failing health system is infant mortality.  The United States is behind many other countries in life expectancies. Not only do we have a low survival rate of babies we have a shorter life span than most other countries.  Furnas says that obesity is one of the reasons for chronic problems in the United States. When looking at the functionality of the United States, there are fast food restaurants on every corner. People drive or take buses to get from point A to point B.

In Italy there are the same amount of McDonald’s since there is one almost every where you are. The difference is that people in Italy walk every where. Since everything is in a close proximity there is no reason to drive or take a metro because it is faster to walk. In America people eat McDonald’s and don’t exercise to get rid of the extra calories they have consumed, and people wonder why Americans are obese. Another difference is the freshness and quality of the food. Even though the restaurants we eat at are technically “fast food” the ingredients are fresh and things are made daily. 

There isn’t as much fat in the foods that they serve. Another thing that contributes to our health care failing is people in America don’t take care of their bodies. Along with the fast food being consumed, people are binge drinking. The drinking starts anywhere from age fifteen until the legal age of twenty-one. When people drink daily or weekly they tend to get what some may call a beer gut. Now I’m not saying a drink here and there is bad, but when it happens so often that people get alcohol poisoning or addicted then it impairs their health. I’ve noticed that people here in Italy tend to stop throughout the day and get a drink at the bar and then continue on with their day. Most people aren’t drinking to get drunk but rather its simply something they have grown up with. They also exercise more than American’s do, so they don’t develop beer guts. 

While we were at the museum of the mind, and the Museum of Medical arts, I realized that everyone has different approaches to people who are different then themselves. For example people were put in the museum of the mind for things as little as a learning problem. This is because some people thought that was an impairment to their health when in reality they just didn’t know how to deal with it. Now the question is what can we take from the Romans to improve our health? In my opinion we can’t take a lot from them except to balance what we eat with exercise. We can’t fix our healthcare system and make it like theirs because we would need to start from the beginning. America is trying to improve the system we have instead of creating one from the very beginning.