So having medical insurance or not determines whether or not a country is a failed state?

By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic. But all you need to do is think about it a bit to realize that's ridiculous.

> So having medical insurance or not determines whether or not a country is a failed state?

If a public health crisis triggers a statistically significant percentage of the population to face bankruptcy due to the inability of it's state to face their most pressing needs then the answer is yes.

So if a gov’t can provide a service it’s a failed state?

That’s just silly.

The US was a failing state before the pandemic, unless you’re upper class. It’s just even more so now.

I remember reading an interesting premise about 5 years ago, that the U.S. was rotting from the bottom up and it just took longer for higher social classes to recognize it. If you were poor and black the U.S. was always a failed state. If you were a factory worker you started noticing it in the 1970s, and then it accelerated with Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound " in the 90s. The former middle class started realizing it with the financial crisis in '09, which knocked many of them out of the middle class. In the last couple years many of my friends (who went to an elite college and all have professional jobs) have started realizing it. Coronavirus probably finally exposed the wealthy to it.

I think it's actually going to get worse before it gets better. Right now we're just a failing state, give it a year or two and we're likely to be a failed state. Then we get to see what emerges from the ashes, but the process of getting there probably won't be pretty.

Interesting how so many people are so desperate to come here and live in this failed state they'll enter the country illegally!

Really remarkable.

Not so remarkable.

“The illegal immigrant population of the United States peaked by 2007, when it was at 12.2 million and 4% of the total U.S. population. Estimates in 2016 put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 10.7 million, representing 3.3% of the total U.S. population. Since the Great Recession, more illegal immigrants have left the United States than entered it, and illegal border crossings are at the lowest in decades. Since 2007, visa overstays have accounted for a larger share of the growth in the illegal immigrant population than illegal border crossings, which have declined considerably from 2000 to 2018. In 2012, 52% of unauthorized immigrants were from Mexico, 15% from Central America, 12% from Asia, 6% from South America, 5% from the Caribbean, and another 5% from Europe and Canada. As of 2016, approximately two-thirds of unauthorized adult immigrants had lived in the U.S. for at least a decade.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...

Those use the Pew numbers, which are known to be bogus because their inflow numbers come from a study that counted only working-age males, and their outflow numbers count everybody, even infants. The true net (through 2016) has always increased, even during the Great Recession.

Please provide a citation backing this assertion.

That's not an argument.

You can be a failing state and still be a better place compared to a place in complete chaos.

> By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic

I believe that was the premise of the article.

> By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic.

That's literally the point of the article

We’ll see if that’s significantly different from prior years.

My guess is that it will be worse, but not in some catastrophic way.

Yes, I agree that medical bankruptcy is a serious problem.

But it’s not new, and doesn’t mean we have a failing state.

I also don’t actually know what the state is across all of Europe. Do all states cover all of their citizen’s Covid treatments?