While the government haemhorrages US$5bn a day on health spending, infant mortality is on a par with Estonia, life expectancy barely reaches Western standards, and 1 in 7 adults don't have the education required to read an average newspaper article or instruction manual, and some states lag 30 years behind others. It has 5% of the world's population, but a staggering 24% of its prisoners. Welcome to the United States of America.

The report looks at a number of different measures of "human development", primarily health, education and income. Taking all factors together, the U.S.A. fell 10 places to 12th in the world, behind 11 nations all of whom have lower GDPs per capita.

The level of inequality within the country was stark, "an average Connecticut resident earns 60 percent more, lives six years longer, and is almost twice as likely to have a college degree as a typical Mississippian." Even more shocking is the degree of disparity between races, "Nationally, Asian males have the highest human development index score and African American males the lowest, with a staggering 50-year gap between the two groups."

I've mentioned the state of American healthcare in passing before, when commenting on the fact that Cuba has been able to achieve a number of the same health metrics as the United States on a fraction of the budget. At the time, I observed that: "The American system meanwhile appears to haemorrhage cash, even in comparison with Britain's NHS - health in the United States is poor by European standards". A new report covered in The Guardian today, "Measure of America" by Oxfam America, seems to confirm that view.

The American health system appears to be suffering from chronic mismanagement. "Despite the fact that the United States spends roughly $5.2 billion every day on health care, more per capita than any other nation in the world, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of every Western European and Nordic country except for one." An Asian man in the United States lives, on average 14 years longer than his African American compatriot.

Meanwhile, US infant mortality rate is in the same league as countries like Cuba and Estonia, ranked 34th in the world. The Guardian note that "if the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday."

And we Brits though the NHS was bad...

Moving on to poverty, it turns out that the richest fifth of Americans earn 15 times as much as the poorest fifth, who survive on an average of just $11,352pa, and 15% of children live in poverty. It's not just pay either - America falls far behind other Western nations in areas such as maternity leave, sick leave, and childcare.

The third major area is education. A worrying "14% of the population - some 40 million Americans - lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks such as understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals. While in much of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia, levels of enrolment of three and four-year-olds in pre-school are running at about 75%, in the US it is little more than 50%."

I'm British, not American, but there are several questions I think our cousins across The Pond should be concerned about here, including (but not limited to) the following:

1) How can you have a functioning democracy if 1 in 7 people aren't capable of reading information about the candidates?

2) How is it possible that health is costing you far more per capita than any other nation, yet you're not even providing universal healthcare? Where is your money going?

3) Why have your leaders allowed such vast differences to open up between states that some are lagging 30 years behind others in health and education?

You can see the full report, including interactive maps and raw data, at http://www.measureofamerica.org/. It's well worth a look.