The Health Secretary relaunched the Presidential Fitness Test on Monday with WWE stars at his side and a diagnosis for the country: "Our children are now the sickest children in the world." [1] Schools begin administering the test this fall; the superlative is its sales pitch. The quote goes in; the rankings come out.
Where the US actually sits
Kennedy has used a version of this line since his first week in office, when he called America "the sickest country in the world," and the rankings answered it then: the United States sits 35th of 169 countries on the Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index and 69th of 167 on the Legatum Prosperity Index health category, with a life expectancy around 80.9 years - roughly 49th in the world. [2] Bad for the wealthiest nation on earth. Roughly a hundred places from last.
Data
| Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index | 35 |
|---|---|
| Legatum Prosperity Index, health | 69 |
For children specifically, the superlative collapses hardest. The world's sickest children live where under-five mortality runs many times the American rate, where malnutrition stunts growth, and where infectious diseases American parents never think about remain leading killers. [2] To call American kids the world's sickest is to erase those children - the ones global health programs exist for - in service of a domestic talking point.
The honest version
There is a real indictment available to a Health Secretary, and it needs no inflation: American children fare worse than their rich-country peers on nearly every measure, and his companion statistic - childhood obesity rising from about 3 percent in the 1960s to about 20 percent today - is roughly consistent with the CDC's own survey data. [1] "Our kids are sicker than any wealthy nation's kids, and here is the plan" is a true sentence and a strong one. The Secretary chose the false one, on the country's most-watched cable network, as the foundation for a program every schoolchild will encounter this fall. [1][2] A fitness test may or may not help. Starting the diagnosis with a wrong fact will not.
