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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean "neglects"? Did the author somehow remove that from his numbers?

The WHO ranks the US low because 62.5% of their score is a measure of inequality. Only 37.5% of their score is related to actual health care measures (health outcomes and patient satisfaction). The US scores #1 on patient satisfaction.

http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf

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Neglects as in they don't consider that spend to be "waste" in the computation of whether Americans are paying more than a comparable country. IMO that should be subtracted off the top as none of that exists in a socialized system. They appear to be attributing those costs to the "higher standard of living".

Patient satisfaction is positively correlated with mortality. It does not necessarily indicate superior care. https://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/publish/news/newsroom/6223

Then apparently a full 75% (rather than the merely 62.5% I thought) of the WHO's scores are nonsense, and not indicative of health care quality.

I assume patient satisfaction only takes into account people who managed to become patients, and doesn't include people in the U.S. who needed treatment but couldn't get it.

Why assume when you can read the report?

Because the report is 215 pages, searching for "satisfaction" doesn't produce anything useful, and most other surveys I've seen use the metrics in that way.

Note: World Health Organization report is from 2000

Do you have something more current?

We have something more relevant, which is that the US spends far more on healthcare than anywhere else, but is in the 10 OECD countries with the lowest life expectancy.

http://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-does-uk-healthcare-spending-com...

> While the USA outspent the UK on healthcare (£6,311 and £2,777 per person2 respectively) in 2014, average life expectancy at birth in the USA was 78.8, compared with 81.4 in the UK.

> Despite spending, by far, the largest amount on healthcare, the USA was among the 10 OECD countries with the lowest life expectancy.

We are all aware that the US spends a lot on healthcare. The article we are discussing provides a good explanation of why.

The fact that health care and health outcomes are minimally correlated is well known; see RAND, Oregon, and lots of non-RCT studies that generally fail to find much correlation (e.g. this one, which made the rounds recently https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/25135... ). I'm not sure what the relevance of that is to this article, however.

AFAICT, the article explains it only in the statistical sense of the word, not the plain-English sense, so I think you're missing the point of the comment.

The plain english explanation is that Americans consume a lot of everything relative to GDP/capita, and health care is not an exception to this.

what you really mean to ask is "Do you have something more current that supports my biases about healthcare"

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