This is despite Americans’ enormous spending on healthcare, which is in a league of its own – inflated by a large private, profit-driven medical industry that charges patients and their insurers an arm and a leg every time they come into contact with the system, regardless of whether the intervention does any good to their health

Like the US’s disturbingly profound poverty, its over-the-top mortality is not due to some technical shortfall or economic constraint. It is a choice. The United States is not only rich. It is better at inventing newfangled drugs and therapies than probably any other country in the world. What it is terrible at is ensuring that its people, even the poor ones, have access to the basic building blocks of a healthy life – from decent jobs and humdrum amenities like potable water, to access to health insurance.

American death and destitution are intimately connected. From the country’s fentanyl addiction to its obesity and its many suicides, often its most deadly afflictions do not call for fancy healthcare technology. It’s the social contract that must be fixed.