What is the first thing you would do if you won the lottery? For Donald Savastano, a 51-year-old carpenter who won $1m in the New York lottery a few weeks ago, it was to go to the doctor. Savastano had been feeling ill for ages but, as he didn’t have health insurance, he hadn’t been able to afford a doctor’s appointment. Following his win, however, he could splurge on luxuries such as healthcare! So, Savastano went for a checkup. It turned out he had stage four cancer and he died shortly after.

If there is a moral to this bleak story it is that the US health “care” system is morally bankrupt. There are 28 million uninsured people in the US. It is one of the richest countries in the world and yet a significant proportion of its population cannot afford access to basic health services; even Americans with health insurance are crippled by the costs of medical coverage.

Even if you don’t have any medical issues, healthcare can be a constant source of worry. I am middle-class and healthy, but, as a freelancer, I can barely afford health insurance in the US. I spend $480 (£345) a month on one of the cheapest healthcare options available. There is a $7,350 (£5,825) deductible, which means that I must pay all my medical expenses until I have spent that amount. If I actually had any health problems, my premiums would be much higher. I do not exaggerate when I say I miss the NHS every day.

Despite the sick state of their health system, many Americans seem to labour under the delusion think that privatised medicine is inherently superior to publicly funded health care. For years, the NHS has been used by conservative Americans as a cautionary tale of “socialised” medicine. When Obama was attempting to widen access to healthcare via the Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as Obamacare) in 2009, rightwing US groups spent millions of dollars on ads that painted Brits as “trapped” by an evil NHS.

Today, with Trump in the White House, rightwing Americans are seizing upon the current NHS crisis as propaganda to try to reverse Obamacare. Earlier this year, for example, the New York Times published a story about the strain the NHS was under; Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the paper, swiftly tweeted the story out with the commentary “What single-payer looks like in Britain.” (Single-payer is a phrase frequently used by Americans to mean government-provided healthcare.) The NHS crisis, of course, is an example of what austerity and a Conservative government look like in the UK, but many American opportunists are ignoring those inconvenient facts.

The latest example of ill-informed American NHS-bashing came on Monday, when Trump sent out a tweet that implied Brits had been marching to protest against the NHS at the weekend. The president stated Britain’s broken health system should serve as an example to Democrats looking to push Universal Health Care in the US.

As large numbers of people promptly informed Trump over Twitter, the reason people were marching over the weekend was to try and save the NHS, not to axe it. Even in crisis the NHS is vastly superior to the US’s inefficient, inequitable system. As Bernie Sanders pointed out in an op-ed for the Guardian last year, the US spends almost $10,000 (£7,200) per capita each year on healthcare; Canadians spend $4,533 (£3,262); the French $4,530; and the British $4,125 (£2,970). And yet, despite this enormous spending, Americans pay the highest prices around the world for prescription drugs and have lower life expectancy than people in most industrialised countries. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Americans aren’t out on the streets marching every weekend, and demanding a system like the NHS.

An office of one’s own: do women really need women-only workplaces?

The past year has seen a rapid rise in women-only co-working spaces and social clubs – a trend that has made me somewhat uneasy. It seems to be a lot more about elitism than feminism.

Most prominent among this wave of women-only spaces is the Wing, whose mission is “to create space for women to advance their pursuits and build community together”. It recently received $32m (£23m) in funding, much of it from a global office space network, WeWork. According to the Wing’s pale-pink website, the business was “born out of the belief that women need and deserve a multi-purpose space designed to make their lives easier, and that magic is created when women gather together”. But that magic is expensive: all-access membership to the Wing is $2,700 (£1,945) a year. “No woman left behind!” the Wing’s website proclaims. Except, you know, for the women who don’t have a spare $2,700 to hand.

Not content with just providing a magical space for women, the Wing also sells branded swag on its website – including $40 T-shirts and $20 shower caps. Where do they source this swag, I wondered? I reached out to the Wing to ask and they informed me that, “we are in the process of revamping our vendor list to work with more women-owned local businesses and hope to be able to share more information soon :)”. I shall refrain from speculating about what that means :-)

Meanwhile, over in the UK, Allbright, a female-focused funding network, is opening a members’ club for working women in central London this year. Founder membership is priced at £600, plus a joining fee of £250. Feminism comes at a price, you know.

Hello? Fashion police? I’d like to report a crime



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unravel Project’s ‘denim waist belt’. Just wrong. Photograph: Net-a-porter

I regret to inform you that the Unravel Project, a streetwear brand worn by the likes of Kim Kardashian, has unveiled a range of legless, crotchless jeans which it is selling for $405 (£290). Worryingly, this sartorial monstrosity, which describes itself as a “waist belt” but looks more like an adult denim diaper, is just the latest in a series of troubling crimes against denim. Last year, for example, Topshop unleashed clear plastic jeans on the world and one-legged jeans were all over Instagram. It’s enough to leave a denim lover very distressed.