Life in numbers

A friend visited from Spain last week and described life in Madrid after moving there from Los Angeles. People, including his family, spend much less time watching TV, among many other differences in their daily lives.

They spend more time on the street, walking somewhere, maybe stopping at a café to watch the world go by. People drive more slowly and roads are smaller.

The anger, worry, and stress levels — tied to getting around, to being sick, to paying the bills — are all much less. Even though he does not yet qualify for national health coverage, his rate for a private policy is about a quarter of what he paid here.

Folks are much more inclined to have a beer at lunch. Bars are all around in Madrid, sometimes three to a block. During the siesta break, he sees them filled with people in suits. And, in his neighborhood, he has run into more Americans who recently moved away from America.

The in-person account happened to coincide with my request a couple days earlier that our EU editor report on a “good news” story, the kind of story that generally does not make the cut in newspapers, maybe because happiness is hoped for but not that interesting to hear about.

You see, I have always found national statistics interesting. For instance, decades ago, I bought statistical reports from the Danish statistical agency in Copenhagen and reviewed others in the spacious, well-lit and warm national library on Soren Kierkegaards Plads, when it was cold and wintry outside.

In the many years since, the EU has put a great deal of effort and money into its statistical agency Eurostat which puts out a flow of reports on a great range of subjects, from asylum applications to milk production, from household income to the amount of materials that come from recycling.

The overall short-term trends are reported in a monthly statistical monitor. November’s edition reported that “The EU economy continued its moderate expansion, supported by moderate GDP growth, declining greenhouse gas emissions and low unemployment. Recent monthly data show improvement in air pollutants concentration in EU capitals, lower electricity consumption and a rising share of net electricity generated from renewable sources.”

Nothing too exciting, right. But it shows a set of trends that are good — lower electricity consumption, more of it coming from renewables, moderate economic growth, low unemployment — all things a reasonable citizen in a rational society would want. (The monitor also reported that national debt is increasing as a GDP percentage and housing prices continue to rise.)

But the Eurostat report that gave me a rise last week was the one on health care costs. You get excellent health care in Europe and it is available to all. Roughly ten percent of their GDP is spent on health care.

The percent ranged from slightly higher levels in Germany, France and the Nordic countries (although Denmark was below the 10% average) and less in Ireland, Hungary and Romania. Even on a Caribbean island that is lucky enough to be part of France (St. Martin), I know from catching Covid there that appointments are easy to get, the care is good, and the pharmacy is modern and well stocked. The pricing on all of it is cheap.

I also have spent vacation time in Japan lately and came down with the flu. A visit to the doctor cost me thirty dollars. I waited about 20 minutes. I did not have an appointment. The medication she prescribed cost me around ten dollars.

So I searched online for the same statistic here in America. Twenty-seven percent of our GDP is being spent on health care in America, three times as much as in Europe and in Japan.

A little while ago, I had a scare that turned out to be just that. But I went to the local hospital. The waiting room was jammed. The nurses estimated the wait at five hours. And yet we spend almost triple what they do in advanced nations across the oceans on either side of us.