Hacker News Reader

Comment by busboybus | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare is irrelevant. Mexicans and Cubans have horrible health care and live the same as Americans.

It boils down to inborn physiological health and lifestyle. Inborn in the sense that IQ is highly predictive of lifespan, because IQ highly correlates with overall physiological health. Singaporeans live a long time because Singapore is a genetic IQ meatgrinder. High IQ people move there and have zero kids.

Americans would clearly live a lot longer than they do if they spent less on healthcare. Healthcare is currently about 20% of USA GDP and we do no better than Mexico, which spends less than 9% of GDP on a much lower cost basis. Ergo, Americans could work four days a week, renounce health care, and live much longer than they do right now.

View on HN

American healthcare is so bad that despite being considerably far less wealthy, Mexico and Cuba have a similar life expectancy.

A big part of that is getting the basics right. Diabetics don't need to start gofundmes to afford insulin, they don't get into medical emergencies if they run low on funds, then get swamped with medical debt from having to be hospitalized (further digging their insulin fund hole). they can live healthy and productive lives.

> American healthcare is so bad

Are there numbers for this? As an American I have enjoyed great health care on-demand all my life at very little or no expense and I pay very little for insurance.

Yes, there are numbers. We spend more than pretty much anyone else and don't have particularly good outcomes among developed countries.

Some of that is explained by efficient outcomes not really being a systematic goal, but we also have a dumb regulatory framework where a bunch of things are highly regulated and prices aren't touched.

Mexico has rampant obesity and type II diabetes. Mexicans simply do not pursue as much treatment as Americans do. It washes out in the lifespan statistics, which call into question the whole point of the healthcare enterprise.

Healthcare is massively overrated.

> Healthcare is massively overrated.

Working in the medical field as an internal medicine physician, I'd say that focused and good-quality healthcare is vital to prolongation of life, and poorly derived, financially-motivated 'medicine as profit' is massively overrated.

You're making the mistake of treating amount spent on healthcare as a proxy for quality of healthcare system. The US spends more per head on healthcare than any other country, but is far down the rankings for health outcomes. This doesn't show that healthcare is irrelevant: it shows that the US healthcare system is so broken that despite spending so much, the outcomes are no better than much poorer countries like Cuba and Mexico. The US is the massive outlier here, and it's no coincidence that the US is also the only rich country without universal healthcare.

> Inborn in the sense that IQ is highly predictive of lifespan

IQ is only a bit more genetic than environmental (about 55-45, from most of what I've seen on the issue), so even if IQ was extremely strongly associated with lifespan, that would be a weak basis for characterizing the latter as being overwhelmingly inborn.

> Americans would clearly live a lot longer than they do if they spent less on healthcare.

That's far from clear; there's reason to suspect American food cut healthcare costs and do as well or better, but there is certainly no guarantee that blindly cutting spending would do that. If

What do the zero kids have to do with it? I don’t follow. No kids to revert to the mean and drag aggregate IQ down? How much immigration is there to Singapore of this type? I can’t imagine it’s some large proportion of the population...

> Inborn in the sense that IQ is highly predictive of lifespan, because IQ highly correlates with overall physiological health.

Correlation is not causation, and many other factors correlate to both lifespan and IQ, neither of which are entirely a result of genetics.

I didn't say otherwise?! Defensive much? IQ is the single best predictor of lifespan. I think this is because ability to perform well on an IQ test means cellular metabolism is operating well in the organism.

Part of the correlation would be caused by unhealthy smart people and healthy not-so-smart people being able to attract one another.

Another would be noncellular things like quality of sleep.

> IQ is the single best predictor of lifespan

[Citation needed]

Healthcare is not irrelevant, that is a ridiculous statement. Perhaps you mean healthcare spending, but even that is only supported by a few outliers like the US.

Lifespan statistics are heavily influenced by early deaths. Drugs and violence take many more lives in the Western Hemisphere than in Singapore. This is enough to explain a large portion of it. Especially during this opioid epidemic.

I'd argue that diet is significantly worse throughout the Western Hemisphere as well, but nutrition is a difficult science.

I don’t even know where to start on how wrong everything you’ve written is.

What is this fucking nonsense?

Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style, regardless of how wrong someone else is?

On HN the idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com