expect the unexpected

Americans' life expectancy is now shorter than 41 countries'. At 77.9, Americans will live shorter lives than most Europeans, the Japanese, Jordanians and people from the Cayman Islands.

Our infant mortality rate is also very high. With 6.8 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births, we're ranked 40th in the world when it comes to infant mortality rate.

This brief AP story, moved today, goes into some of the reasons,

But "it's not as simple as saying we don't have national health insurance," said Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal. "It's not that easy."

Among the other factors:

• Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

"The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy," said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. "We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times."

• Racial disparities. Black Americans have an average life expectancy of 73.3 years, five years shorter than white Americans.

Interestingly, the story, unlike Michael Moore's awful movie, also mentions other causes aside from not having socialized health care. Our lack of a national health care system--there are 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance!--is undoubtedly the number one cause for our population being so unhealthy. But other factors, like the quality of our eating habits and lifestyles should not be ignored.

Most alarming are the numbers for Black Americans:

Black American males have a life expectancy of 69.8 years, slightly longer than the averages for Iran and Syria and slightly shorter than in Nicaragua and Morocco.

• A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.

Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.

"It really reflects the social conditions in which African American women grow up and have children," said Dr. Marie C. McCormick, professor of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health. "We haven't done anything to eliminate those disparities."

This is shameful; that we're allowing a discernible part of our population live by Third World standards.

The United States needs nothing short than a national health initiative. Nothing short of our national commitment to put a man on the moon in the '60s. We're seeing all the major candidates support a socialized health care, but that's not enough. And it's very easy now that most Americans favor it.

We need a candidate who will stare into a TV camera and tell us we need to reform our eating habits. We need to rethink our cities and curb suburban sprawl. We need to offer educational programs for our marginalized minorities, and an actual safety net. We need to rethink how we subsidize the price of oil. And then we need a candidate who will follow through on those promises. Anything short of that is just politics as usual.