"For a while, we could believe that our amazing technology, our wonder drugs and our good old-fashioned know-how were finally winning the war against illness and disease... Too bad it couldn't last."

We all know the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. We tell it to the children in our lives with the self assurance that comes from believing we're far too intelligent to be fooled like the people in the story. We're too smart for that we think, but are we really?

Earlier this year, newspaper and online headlines were touting the wonderful news about America's declining death rate and our rising life expectancy. In 2004, for instance, the annual number of deaths plummeted by 50,000. We owe this respite from the grim reaper to impressive declines in our top three killers: heart disease, cancer and stroke. Meanwhile, we were further buoyed by the news that life expectancy has edged up to 77.9 years. They say good news comes in threes and we were not to be disappointed. Other headlines trumpeted the latest figures on obesity, noting that the obesity rate among women appears to have leveled off and is no longer on the increase.

No doubt, workers from the CDC and the NIH, the pharmaceutical and medical industries and just about every other healthcare organization great and small, were high-fiving each other over this triumphant news. For a while, we could believe that our amazing technology, our wonder drugs and our good old-fashioned know-how were finally winning the war against illness and disease.

Too bad it couldn't last.

A new study published in the May 3rd issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association paints a far less cheerful picture of the state of American health. In fact, hang on to your chair, because the real story is downright disturbing.

The study is titled, Disease Disadvantages in the United States and England. It begins with a rundown of what we spend for healthcare. Americans spend about $5,274 per capita vs. $2,164 per capita for people in the UK. That's a difference of $3110. The driving question behind the study was a simple one. What is the relationship between the health of the group targeted in the study and their socioeconomic status? Considering the high cost of American healthcare, readers may be more curious to know whether Americans are getting their money's worth.

The researchers wanted to make the most precise comparison between the two countries possible. In studies like this, including different ethnicities among the subjects can introduce confounding factors that can make interpretation of the data far more difficult. For this reason, only non-Hispanic whites were included. Study subjects included men and women and were matched up by income and education. They ranged in age from 55 to 64 years old. The results were disheartening.

Despite per capita healthcare spending that's more than twice what people spend in the UK, America scored twice the amount of diabetes, 10 percentage points higher for hypertension and 6 percentage points higher for all heart disease. For myocardial infarction, stroke, lung disease and cancer, Americans were shown to be significantly sicker. When researches tried to tease out the cause of this substantial difference in wellness by analyzing risk factors like smoking, obesity and drinking, they failed to explain why Americans were sicker.

One result of this study which should not have been a surprise was that people who had less money and less education tended to be less healthy than better educated, wealthier people. This was true in both countries, but what must have come as something of a shock was that for heart disease and diabetes, people at the top of the American socioeconomic scale were nearly as bad off as people at the bottom of the British socioeconomic scale.

A study from the University of Washington in Seattle reveals that there are 2.8 million American children with elevated blood sugar levels, a precursor to diabetes. An April 5th study published in JAMA shows that while there was little increase in obesity among women between the years 1999 - 2004, there were significant increases among men over that same period. This study also showed that children and adolescents were rapidly gaining excess weight as well. Autism, a rare disorder once known to occur in 3 to 5 out of 10,000 children now occurs in 1 in 175 children, according to the CDC. It is now classified as very common.

Suddenly the rosy headlines from weeks past seem less comforting. Some people have begun to ask, what good is it if life expectancy increases a bit, on average, if more people are getting sicker sooner? What's the advantage of a falling death rate if the quality of life falls along with it, due to illness and disease? For years, Americans have turned a blind eye to the reality of our declining health. We continue to eat the food that we intuitively know is destroying us. We keep trying to implement a weight management philosophy based on low-fat foods, even though it has failed us in the past and we're fairly certain it will fail us in the future. We watch the drug ads on TV and desperately want to believe that the miracles they promise will finally work for us too. We see our doctors and tell them where it hurts, and are comforted when they tell us that our condition is common too, because misery loves company.

Many of us, blinded by health science corrupted with politics and money, covet the trinkets of our consumer society to the bitter end, as we slip into a medicalized oblivion. Fat, diseased and washed up, we step aside so that our children may carry on the tradition of blind obedience to the failed healthcare policies of our leaders. It is only then, in that last moment before the long night of eternity, that we acknowledge a final and terrible truth & that we received less, much less than our money's worth and that much of what we believed about health, nutrition and the safety of our environment, was a lie. Finally, we can speak the truth to power &

The emperor has no clothes.