What The Hell America!

US political discourse is characterized by deep resignation about the high costs and mixed outcomes of our health, housing, education, and childcare systems. But these issues aren’t unfixable — in fact, many other countries have already fixed them.

In an America where health care costs bankrupt families, where housing costs consume half of many workers’ incomes, and where politicians disingenuously maintain that paid family leave is beyond our capacity as the wealthiest nation in world history, we clearly need a more ambitious policy vision. Likewise, at a specific juncture when many voters who are concerned about the economy cast their ballots for a billionaire who has now set about eviscerating public programs and favoring the ultrarich, we clearly need messengers to carry that vision to the public.

Other countries have solved many problems considered unsolvable in the United States. But in a fog of recent demoralization and age-old American exceptionalism, Americans are apt to shrug and say, “That is there, and this is here.” Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe, which explores where some of the world’s best social policies came from and how they work, is a necessary intervention. Hakimi Zapata’s book makes it abundantly clear that other countries have faced challenges and choices just like ours and have elected to pool their resources — which are usually considerably less than ours — to provide a higher quality of life for themselves.

Hakimi Zapata methodically examines how other nations have found ways to ensure basics like health care and education to more eclectic social provisions like digital rights and pension equality. From Norway’s generous family policies to Singapore’s innovative public housing model, Another World Is Possible offers a refreshing and desperately needed perspective on what’s achievable when societies prioritize the common good.

Meagan Day

What inspired you to undertake this exercise in international policy comparison?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

I’ve been working in progressive media for about fifteen-plus years now. Throughout that time, I’ve also lived in a few other countries. I started to feel like the problems I’d been reporting on in the US that felt so intractable were, in some cases, solved problems elsewhere.

I really wanted to share these stories of success. There’s a real sense of despair and defeat on the Left. I wanted to write a book conveying: We can do these things. They are working in other places. Here are the stories you could arm yourselves with as we fight for a better society.

I come from a family of immigrants. My mom was undocumented from Mexico, and I grew up with the idea that my brothers and I were little American Dreams. I was the first in my family to get a college degree. But as I got older, I started to feel like the American Dream was actually more possible in other places I lived.

That realization was also partly triggered by a health incident with my mom. She couldn’t afford health insurance for many years and had undiagnosed diabetes that culminated in her having her right foot amputated. At the time, I was worried about her health, but I also had a concern about how we were going to afford the care she needed.

I knew that wouldn’t be a concern in countries that have universal health care like the United Kingdom, where I now live. It’s not necessary to add another layer of financial fear and uncertainty to health concerns. I started to feel like the United States can and should do better.

Meagan Day

Finland’s education system is renowned worldwide. What makes it so successful, and how does it differ from American schools?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Finland’s approach addresses a core problem in American society — the “off-ramps” that allow wealthy Americans to access better services while most citizens have limited options. Through education reform, Finland essentially eliminated these off-ramps. There are almost no fee-charging schools now, and their universal public education system is built on the principle that your local school is the best possible school.

All Finnish teachers receive a fully state-funded master’s degree, creating consistent educational standards and building trust in the profession. Teachers have significant autonomy to apply pedagogical approaches — ironically, many of them developed in America. One Finnish teacher told me, “We are applying concepts and theories invented in the US. We just have more freedom to apply them in our classrooms than you all do.”

This contrasts sharply with the American system, where No Child Left Behind and similar reforms created an obsession with testing tied to school funding. As one Finnish teacher explained, “If you’re constantly testing, you’re missing the point of testing, which is to show learning gaps so you can address them.”

The Finnish system produces high-achieving students who spend fewer hours in class, have less homework, and take almost no standardized tests. The state provides universal free school meals, ensuring every student gets at least one nutritious meal daily. When the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] first conducted the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing, Finland’s high performance surprised even the architects of their reforms.

By eliminating private off-ramps and investing in making the Finnish public education system the best it could be, Finland created not just a healthier and more equitable society but actually a higher-performing education system.

Meagan Day

Singapore’s public housing approach is quite different from the American model. What did you learn about it?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

I felt it was important to include Singapore because it’s such a different context from the other countries I looked at. Singapore is a hypercapitalist society where even things that we take for granted in the US as publicly funded, like schools, are fee-charging. It’s a very “pick yourself up by your own bootstraps” kind of place — except for their approach to housing.

What’s fascinating about their model is that the state owns most of the land and maintains ownership of it. But they’ve built high-quality, mixed-income, well-designed public housing neighborhoods with transportation and commercial services to serve these communities. Singaporeans can become homeowners through a mandatory pension savings program funded by both employees and employers.

This has resulted in 80 percent of Singaporeans living in public housing and 90 percent of them being homeowners.

Meagan Day

Most Americans know about the United Kingdom’s National Health Service [NHS] but have no clue how it was created. The fact that their system is public while ours is private just appears natural and inevitable and goes unexamined. What’s the history of the NHS?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

The UK’s NHS is a good example of how sometimes the darkest periods in a country’s history can yield some of the best solutions. The NHS rose from the ashes of World War II when British society was deciding what kind of country they wanted to rebuild.

They elected their first Labour government with Clement Attlee. The health minister Nye Bevan understood that if there was going to be massive public investment in the health care system, which was mostly private and charity hospitals bombed during the war, it should belong to the people.

To this day, it’s still free at the point of delivery, paid for by general taxation. A crucial lesson is that people had to fight to get it, and now they have to fight to keep it. I’ve reported on how successive governments from [Margaret] Thatcher to [Tony] Blair onward have defunded and privatized certain aspects of it, yet it remains widely beloved by the British people.

Overall, it’s still an effective system ensuring everyone has access to quality health care. You see it in the results — Britons live on average four years longer than Americans. The UK system, despite spending nearly half what the US does as a percentage of GDP, outperforms our broken system.

Meagan Day

Many Americans believe systems like the NHS provide inferior care. Is that accurate?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

No, it’s not accurate. Due to defunding and the pandemic, there are long waiting lists in the UK; that’s what people often point to when comparing systems. But there are also long waiting lists in the US. The difference is that at the end of that line in the UK, you will always have access to the treatment you need, whereas in the US, you might be denied coverage or unable to access care without insurance.

In terms of wait times, it’s not a massive difference. In the UK, 21 percent of people wait less than a day for treatment versus 28 percent in the US. For specialists, about 41 percent wait less than a month in the UK versus 27 percent in the US. The emergency rooms work the same way in both countries — you’ll get emergency care immediately when needed.

I also want to highlight the expense myth. There’s an idea in the US that we don’t pay much tax and that’s why we don’t have universal health care and family-friendly policies. But if you include mandatory health insurance in the calculation, Americans face the second-highest effective tax rate in the OECD for the average family with two kids.

In the UK with universal health care, the labor tax rate is about 26 percent. In Norway, with universal health care and family-friendly policies, it’s 32 percent. In the US, it’s over 43 percent. We’re simply getting a bad deal.

Meagan Day

Norway’s family policies are outstanding. What makes them so effective?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Norway decided in the 1970s that to grow their economy, they needed full employment, which meant bringing women and traditionally unpaid labor into the formal workforce. The Labour Party approached paid parental leave as both an economic and feminist question. Interestingly, they built a coalition with the Christian Democrats, who supported it for completely different reasons — to uphold traditional family values.

The impact of paid parental leave has been tremendous. One finance minister noted a 20 percent GDP increase since these family-friendly policies were implemented. There are also significant health benefits, with lower maternal and infant mortality rates compared to the US.

Parents get about a year combined (including accrued vacation time) at 100 percent salary to be home with newborns. Afterward, they have access to high-quality childcare where no one pays more than about $400 monthly, regardless of whether it’s private or public.

A key innovation is the “pappaperm” or daddy quota — three months of nontransferable leave specifically for fathers or co-parents. This ensures they’re not just assistants but primary caregivers for a substantial period.

This transforms gender relations both at home, with more equitable distribution of caregiving, and in the workplace, with reduced gender discrimination. Since all parents, regardless of gender, take similar amounts of leave and have equal sick leave for children, employers can’t discriminate based on assumptions about who will handle family responsibilities.

Meagan Day

Your book is so optimistic in such a pessimistic time. What political constituency could carry these ideas forward in the United States?

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

I didn’t expect to be going around the country talking about hope during such a dark moment. It feels like we’re on the defensive right now with so much being dismantled.

But it comes back to this idea that dark periods countries experience can yield hopeful, amazing results. The NHS rose from the ashes of World War II. Uruguay’s renewable energy transition came from a period of financial crisis and rolling blackouts. Norway, Finland, and Singapore all developed their policies as ways to grow their economies when they had few resources.

The lesson is that even amid despair, these ideas are taking root. What gave me hope recently was seeing states like Missouri, Alaska, and Nebraska — considered deep red states — pass paid sick leave on their ballots with large majorities, Nebraska with 74 percent.

This shows that regardless of what we label these ideas, whether we call them progressive or acknowledge they come from the Left, people across the political spectrum are drawn to them and working to pass them, mostly at the local level.

When we talk about constituencies, we should focus on building our movements and coalitions, arming ourselves with these success stories from around the world, and being prepared for the next opportunity to get this done.

Great Job Natasha Hakimi Zapata & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.