Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
That isn't to disagree with the causes given in the article, but after talking to those doctors it made me realize how complicated it is to get accurate comparisons between countries.
On first glance, New Zealand (0.94%) and Australia (0.48%) top the OECD for rate of homelessness, as they include people living in temporary accomodation (sleeping on a couch, motels, etc.) or cars as homeless. Whereas Japan (with the 0.00%) only counts people sleeping rough). Comparing unemployment rates has similar issues.
Comparing these kinds of rates between countries on an absolute basis is largely useless. However, the change in these rates can give insight on how events (political, economic, etc) have changed the demographics and socioeconomic status of countries.
Politicians eventually gamed the metric so hard that it's almost worthless now, so economists today mostly use U-6.
Edit: apparently I'm wrong, Wikipedia states that 'life expectancy at birth (LEB) is the most commonly used measure'.
There are several reasons the US rate is so much higher than in other developed countries. The US does not have universal health care, which means large sections of the US population does not get adequate follow up during pregnancy.
If you look at health care for the poor in the US, it is generally geared towards emergency care. They will stitch you up if you are about to die. However it generally does not cover regular doctor visits and checkups. Hence in the US a lot of expensive effort goes into saving babies when born, when the problem could far more easily have been resolved early in the pregnancy with better checkups.
The US system is simply not very geared towards simple preventative care. Where other health care systems tend to focus on simple cheap system. American health care is overly focused on advance equipment, complicated procedures and basically anything which gives a lot of prestige or profits.
Problem is that such a health care system does not perform very well in the real world. You end up with very high costs and poor results.
E.g. a lot of health problems in the US is actually caused by over-treatment. That is the irony of the US system. Poor people who need help don't get it. People with expensive health care plans OTOH are subject to invasive procedures they don't need because it brings in profit. E.g. the US has overuse of surgery. So basically people who don't need surgery are cut open in the US. And that does take a toll on your health.
The opioid crisis killing Americans is a variation of this. Basically it is overmedication for the sake of profits. The health care system is actually a contributor to the bad health problems in the US.
It really should lead people to question for-profit health care, but it seems impossible to question anything about capitalism in the US. You speak to deaf ears.
> If you look at health care for the poor in the US, it is generally geared towards emergency care. They will stitch you up if you are about to die. However it generally does not cover regular doctor visits and checkups. Hence in the US a lot of expensive effort goes into saving babies when born, when the problem could far more easily have been resolved early in the pregnancy with better checkups.
That’s absolutely false. Medicaid covers preventative services: https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/coverage-of-prevent...
CHIP also covers pregnant women and children under 19 and covers pre-natal checkups and delivery.
For non-hispanic black women, the death rate is a staggering 40.8 — that's over 13x higher than Finland!
Large parts of America are a third world country.
Asians, meanwhile, in the US have a maternal mortality rate of about 13, which would be 4x higher than Finland, but a life expectancy of over 86 years—several years longer than Japan or Korea, and 4 years longer than Finland. Indeed, the life expectancy of Hispanics in America is about the same as people in Finland.
It would be odd to see such disparities between maternal mortality on one hand and life expectancy on the other. Likewise it would be odd for Finland to be so much better than the UK. So I suspect there is more to the story than “large parts of America are a third world country.”
ProPublica, Vox and Texas Tribune did a great in depth article on this last year, "The Extraordinary Danger of Being Pregnant and Uninsured in Texas". Most of what they found is applicable across the country, Texas just happens to be particularly horrific.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-extraordinary-danger-...
edit: "And Medicaid pays well for that."
> In Texas, as in other parts of the U.S., providers are paid only about half as much for Medicaid patients as for privately insured ones.
Not so in the US. It would be surprising if that alone didn't account for a significant number of adverse outcomes.
While there are many that don't have this kind of setup I don't know any country where care isn't free at the point of use. (Except for maybe your deductibles).
Also, Canada.
Yes so in the US. That's literally what the person you replied to just told you: For pregnant women, children, and poor people, it's all fully covered.
It's really only the middle class that has it hard (i.e. expensive).
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/01/how-much-...
By contrast, the entirety of my close and extended family lives in poverty. Bankruptcy, car repos, eviction, and mortgage default are almost a game. MY father died at the age of 40. My grandfather: 36. My brother died at 42 (after a lethal encounter with police after speeding).
I'm 56 (The oldest of any male in two generations). I have multiple retirement accounts. First class healthcare. I take care of my Mom. I can't predict the future, but I suspect my economic success will allow me a longer, more fulfilling life.
I'm convinced that access to healthcare, decent work, and basic housing would have allowed my short lived male family members to live longer with a better quality of life.
I’m pretty sure ZDurmphoto has a good idea of their brothers situation.
Also, the police are less likely to violently arrest you if you're driving a supercar, I'd wager
I know this personally, as I've spent 21yrs of my life in one half, and another 20 in the other half.
I've also lived overseas for several years, and they also have stratas, but much less pronounced than here in the US.
- Something like 2x as much surgery done in the US than in other countries, because it is profitable, not because it is needed. So perfectly health people are cut open, because they got a good insurance which can pay for it.
- Opioid crisis. Again having health insurance is a problem, not a benefit in this case. That turns you into a money bag, they can push opioids on.
- Antibiotic resistance. America is all about getting more of everything. Quantity over quality, which unfortunately also means excessive use of antibiotics making Antibiotic resistance a major problem.
The US system really isn't working for anyone. It means those who cannot pay get too little treatment, and those who can pay get too much. If only there was a way to even it out...
That's a ridiculous statement, it benefits the wealthy massively. We can argue over whether or not these benefits would be even more massive without over-treatment, but there is no doubt about the overall benefits to the wealthy.
>A Harvard analysis of 1.4 billion Internal Revenue Service records on income and life expectancy that showed staggering differences in life expectancy between the richest and poorest also found evidence that low-income residents in wealthy areas, such as New York City and San Francisco, have life expectancies significantly longer than those in poorer regions.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expe...
Fatal opioid use is less common with wealthy folks, and great diet + exercise + friends (easier if you're rich) are all good prevention mechanisms against antibiotic resistant bacteria.
When going to a doctor for a simple diagnosis or bloodwork can easily cost $400 to $1000, many put off doctor visits unless it's an emergency. It can easily become a choice between a doctor visit or a car repair. Preventative checkups are gone and insurance is only something one uses with an emergency room visit or major health issue.
A perfect example is vitamin deficiency and the very serious effects such deficiencies can have, and how inexpensive the preventative care is.
Generally necessary pathology/radiology or routine blood tests are covered by medicare which is paid for by a levy of about 1% on income.
Likewise pharmaceuticals are generally fairly low cost (there are exceptions), being subsidised by the government and for low income or people with ongoing requirements can be free.
Private health insurance is available and encouraged by a decrease in your medicare levy, but a lot of people are finding that it doesn't provide any financial benefit and as we have a very good public health system, does not provide any better health outcome.
Health Insurance is not a major concern in Australia. It certainly is not tied to an employer and doesn't rate on the list of things to worry about when getting a job.
So you won't seek medical treatment at a hospital if you get injured or become severely ill? Or do you plan to go to the hospital and pay out of pocket? Or, like some other voluntarily uninsured people, will you ask for medical treatment and then just not pay?
> than work a low waged job and pay for Obamacare.
Why would a "low waged" job be a requirement, unless that's the only job you can get? You can pay for Obamacare with a middle or high wage job too. You can also pay for it if you are self employed (which is a lot of people on Obamacare).
Someone making $15/hr is likely does not have any assets that would be surrendered in chapter 7 bankruptcy. A lot of people would gladly crater their credit score for a few years to delete an $80,000 bill. Plenty of people crater their credit scores over dumber stuff.
This is where it gets uncomfortable, isn't it? That their lives are so miserable, that they would gladly trade away years and years of expected lifespan for higher quality of life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_...
It isn’t the way we should want this to work, but it is certainly something that people actually do.
This is the life I have in capitalist America. I'm afraid to do basic things like ride a bicycle in fear of it financially crippling me to the point that I'm incapable of paying rent and becoming homeless
I'm saying low waged as in I make $14/hr or less. I mean it boggles my mind that you'd even say that because there frankly, is a large portion of the US who don't make Silicon Valley salaries.
It’s factually correct. For example [0]:
Life expectancy increases with age as the individual survives the higher mortality rates associated with childhood. For instance, the table above listed the life expectancy at birth among 13th-century English nobles at 30. Having survived until the age of 21, a male member of the English aristocracy in this period could expect to live:
1200–1300: to age 64
1300–1400: to age 45 (because of the bubonic plague)
1400–1500: to age 69
1500–1550: to age 71
17th-century English life expectancy was only about 35 years, largely because infant and child mortality remained high. Life expectancy was under 25 years in the early Colony of Virginia, and in seventeenth-century New England, about 40 percent died before reaching adulthood.
During the Industrial Revolution, the life expectancy of children increased dramatically. The under-5 mortality rate in London decreased from 74.5% in 1730–1749 to 31.8% in 1810–1829.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over...
Tax incidence doesn’t not depend on who writes the actual check to the government.
When you get your monthly paycheck, your employer had already withheld the income tax and sent it to the government treasury. Does that mean that you pay no income tax, and the employer kindly covers it for you? No, of course not.
When you buy a new phone, 19% VAT tax is paid. Who pays it? The retailer is responsible to send the money to government, does it mean that he pays full tax, and consumers pay no VAT? Of course not, VAT is reflected in price, and if there was no VAT, the prices would fall down. Suppose that government said that half of VAT is paid by buyer, and half by seller. Would that make any difference at all to anyone involved? No, the final price paid by the customer would be the same, the amount of revenue received by the seller after VAT would be the same, and the government would receive the exact same amount of money. Of course, the outcome would be exactly the same for any other government mandated “split” in who pays VAT.
Similarly, any split in who nominally pays healthcare tax does not in fact matter in the slightest with respect to who actually bears the burden of the tax. Government cannot mandate that half of the burden is on employer and half on employee, because it simply has no power to do so: tax incidence depends on relative elasticities of supply and demand, and not at all on what the government claims the incidence to be. In case of taxing labor, almost all of the incidence is on the seller, that is, on the worker. So, government might say that half of tax is paid by the employer, but the only result of it is that some people are tricked in actually believing that.
- 3 months in Japan - 3 Months in Germany - 3 months in the US - 3 months in India
The transition was alarming. I see bits of both Germany and India in the US. Unfortunately (having grown up in America) I see the trend as towards India. I don't mean this as a cultural slight, but as a cultural observation. I've seen high-trust vs low-trust societies brought up many times on HN. Traffic was most pronounced. In Germany, they obeyed the rules to the extent they wouldn't J-walk even if there was no traffic. In America, you'd look both ways then cross. In India might makes right, big cars get the right of way, pedestrians have to be aggressive and just make their way, eyeballing cars down with a death stare of determination.
Anyway all this is to say, it seems like there are two types of wealth:
- In India, you can found a startup, make money, buy a Ferrari, but that would be a terrible move because if you drive it anywhere on public roads you will go max 30kph, and it will get destroyed on the roads - In Germany, you can have a modest Skoda and still hit 200 kph on their impeccable freeways with confidence that the person in the right lane will never, ever change lanes without a signal and mirror check
So, my personal take, and I realize that this is highly reductionist, but I hope, relevant is that there are two types of wealth:
1. a type where society is wealthy, and that translates into well being for the individual and the whole 2. a type where wealth is relative, and the wealthy take joy not in having an absolute sense of wealth (as in compared to a German), but as in "my neighbor lives in a shack and I live in a gated tower high rise"
I fear America is at a cross roads and will make a choice that makes us poor in a global sense.
America made the choice in the 1980s, with the arrival of Reagan, to transition from being a rich society to being a poor society that has a fair number of rich people in it. Income inequality has deteriorated since then, the quality of public services/public infrastructure has severely degraded, and social trust is rapidly eroding. It's almost certainly too late to change course.
> with confidence that the person in the right lane will never, ever change lanes without a signal and mirror check
Always expect someone to sleep at the steering wheel and switch lanes at an instant without so much as using the signal. Especially when you are going 200kph.
I think the key thing was getting past the lower rungs of the Maslow hierarchy. It is very difficult to concentrate on schooling (or anything) when you are hungry or sick. I was constantly hungry when we didnt have free public school meals. A close relative had TB, due to poor healthcare where the hospital/system didn't seem to give a darn. The worst thing is how horrible normal people treated you (even teachers at public school.) I was constantly sick, probably due to poor nutrition.
College was great, I will still poor, but the prospects were getting better and all the basics were covered (no longer hungry; decent healthcare). This allowed more happiness because you knew it would be over soon.
With better jobs comes more stress -- the expectations (perhaps justified) that one should have a home, that one should have a school for children w/o crime/gangs -- and bigger mortgages, bigger spending. I live fairly conservatively despite decent career success, but I can see how I could "become unhappy trying to reach happiness" ... all that said, i'd take unhappy-rich to hungry-poor any day.
Personally I've decided to forgo as many personal luxuries as possible (ie don't fly first class, no boat besides a shitty canoe, no peasant steel case rolex, no car worth > $20k in an effort to retire with a few million in liquid assets on top of my house by my early 40s. Having no worries is the ultimate luxury.
Alternatively, if I lived in California where the weather is mild perhaps I would just go full Diogenes.
Metro-Denver, Metro-Austin/Dallas/Huston, Metro-Atlanta, Metro-Nashville, Metro-Chicago, Metro-Detroit, Metro-Minneapolis, etc. etc. etc.
I’d say it’s more city/suburban vs rural. This doesn’t account for the poor & homeless in all of America’s inner cities, but does a better job explaining.
Maybe “Fortune 500 headquarters adjacent” is the better indicator. The towns with big global companies almost always have affluent suburbs surrounding them. Even Cincinnati has tons of affluent people due to P&G.
Chicago, for example. My old stomping grounds. The inequality within that city is stark. Glaring. The South and West sides are a world apart from the North side.
In SF or LA they'd be middle-class.
It's not just about wealth in dollars, it's about purchasing power.
Wikipedia's collected some of the recent per-county census data here, although that isn't a perfect metric since states vary a lot in county size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
In general there's a good/bad outcomes split within (almost?) every major American city between the affluent and the poor neighborhoods. I haven't verified this with the life-expectancy data, but I would bet it differs more between rich vs. poor areas within each state, than it does between coastal and non-coastal states.
County level:
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/life-expectancy-by-c...
State and county level:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/life-expectancy/...
If you generally are in the Bay Area or LA you rarely see the level of obesity you see in say Houston despite the fact that both areas despite being rich have their fair share of the poor too.
Similarly for smoking. It's exceedingly rare to see public smoking in the Bay Area.
Similarly for diets. When traveling in the South I was amazed at just how ridiculously unhealthy the average food eaten by the average person there was. Everything deep fried, laden with calories, consumed along with sugary drinks.
Food deserts and gang violence - both accelerated by concentrated poverty - are a couple of ways this manifests in some of the "elite" cities.
Health care was one of them. I never really liked health care in Norway. I didn't think doctors was all that eager to help often. In the US I kind of experience the opposite, but I slowly realized there was a very dark side to this. All too often I saw that it was just a show to please the "customer."
Basically in the US I saw little patient and health thinking and much more of a profit and customer thinking in health care. So often suggestions and procedures where obviously followed for pure profit motive. I discovered on may occasions how I would be given useless drugs and suggestions just to drive profits.
I think all health care systems are flawed in some way. Norwegian health care is no exception. But in the US I saw that it was possible to do much worse. The sad irony of this is that this happened while US doctors from my impression are exceptionally skilled. Problem is that they are in a system which push them to think about money rather than health care.
A US system where incentives go realigned to serve people rather than profits could quite possibly turn into one of the best health care systems in the world.
Homicides, road accidents, and infant deaths are harder to control as an individual.
1. All the other rich countries have steadily increased health expenditure per capita, and for some reason this really accelerated in the US around the early '80s. But the money looks like it mostly went to things that didn't increase life expectancy. Maybe this was a Reagan thing?
2. The US had the highest cigarette sales until the mid '70s, but is now one of the lowest per capita. This is actually one of the things that the US has done better than its counterparts, e.g. Japan and Germany have higher cigarette sales per capita. However the death rate from smoking remains the highest, probably due to a combination of other factors such as poor healthcare.
3. Around the late '90s, the US really started to pull away from the rest of the rich countries in terms of death rate from opioid overdoses. Some of this spilled over into Canada, but they were able to keep it somewhat under control.
4. For deaths from both obesity and road accidents, the US just hasn't made the same sort of gains as the others since 1990.
EDIT: It turns out reading even not-so-carefully results in fruit! From the article:
> But the chart also shows that smoking peaked earlier in the US. Since there is a lag of two to three decades between the peak of smoking and the peak of smoking mortality, this should be positive news for the US going forward. The country is over this mortality peak and we should expect the decline in lung cancer death rates in the US to continue in the coming years.
The reason why I bring this up is I know of at least one metric where the definitions being used are quite disparate: child mortality. The US is very inclusive in counting pre-mature births as infant mortality whereas a lot of other countries would conclude these were not viable births and thus are not counted in the statistic.
Here is a blurb I found quickly (from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856058/)
> First, many countries also have reporting requirements related to birth weight and may not report infants under 500 grams as live births (MacDorman and Mathews 2009). Second, the presence of assisted reproductive technologies has increased the frequency of multiple births, which have higher mortality rates.
I am a US->Canada transplant, and the cultural and economic differences here just don’t seem that stark. Yes, there is universal health care, obviously…but there is definitely not an abundance of easily available mental health care here, especially outside the major metro areas. And the health care in the most economically disadvantaged areas (First Nations reservations) certainly isn’t platinum care.
Really, the road deaths chart stands out to me. Canada is very car centric, and huge, and full of plenty of large animals to hit. I simply cannot hazard a guess as to why it’s that different.
https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transport...
Just eyeballing it, it looks to me like the death rate from road accidents in each country correlates strongly with vehicle-kilometers driven per capita. Americans die at a higher rate because they spend more time on the roads covering more distance.
And that makes some sense. A huge percentage of the country lives in a fairly narrow band near the US border in large cities. With not a lot of driving to other cities. Because they’re too far away.
Though, now that I think about it, residential street speed limits are way lower here.
IMO it's simple (and this is of course a common view): healthcare in the United States is a failed market. It's not about free market fundamentalism vs socialism, it's just that in this case, this market is totally broken. Costs are completely out of control, and accordingly, access, that is, access without incurring crippling debt, is a huge problem.
Obama tried to address both cost and access. He went up against the insurance companies, and lost. He got somewhere on access, but even that is just access to insurance; insurance that may leave you with thousands of dollars to pay out-of-pocket if you walk into the ED with a complaint. So maybe you don't go.
Socialized medicine, it seems, certainly won't fly in this country. But socialized insurance, "Medicare for all"? We, the little people, have many reasons to support a multi-decade experiment with that.
There's no ideology here. It's just insane (unless you're profiting!) given history for us to continue imagine that in this case the Invisible Hand is going to fix things.
The same endless propaganda and sloganeering brought to bear against socialized medicine in every medium and from every mainstream politician to make us think that it's obviously an impossibility in the US (because reasons), is used against Medicare for all. The possibility of changing US healthcare has never had a relationship with any potential improvement in health outcomes or lowering of costs - the chance for any new plan relies on how well it preserves the profits of an industry that consumes twice the proportion of GDP here as it does in any other country.
One of the reasons M4A is criticized has been that it doesn't directly lower anything except administrative overhead (which is massive, but trivial in comparison to the difference between US health care costs and the costs of the civilized world, which would have kept the US in budget surpluses year after year.) It relies on government to put pressure on prices. As the industry's only customer, it would obviously have the leverage, but with most individual politicians being funded by the industry, there's no expectation that it would suddenly have the will. M4A is criticized for not being socialized medicine (i.e. an NHS-like program) by interests who are also against socialized medicine.
The reason Obama passed ACA is because it preserved industry profits, stalled the growth in the rise of healthcare costs, and would hopefully delay the next mass challenge to the status quo. At the beginning of the 2020 election cycle, popular pressure led to virtually all of the early Democratic primary lineup to feign support for M4A, and by the end of the cycle it wasn't even in the platform as an aspirational goal, despite the VP-elect owing her entire initial media presence from her (later-reversed) support of Sanders' bill.
Getting M4A passed will likely be as difficult as getting socialized medicine passed, and would require immense and focused public pressure. We had the most popular candidate in the country run on it as a central issue twice, and during the second time, a new virus changed everyone's daily lives in the middle of the election. Still, through the media, it became a referendum on the personality of a reality show host, Russian spies, and secret pedophile networks. Rational healthcare policy has no hope.
At some point, people may identify many of these people and entities for what many of them really are: leeches of society--not value creators. Let's not confuse your entrepreneur innovating and improving life with profit maximizing corporatism.
We continue to play this experiment under a rhetoric that claims this is progress, all while we continue to play the song of failed promises of trickle down economics. To me, our current direction seems a lot more regressive than progressive, but who am I.
A more serious way of putting it might be that the US is in raw dollar terms one of the richest countries in the world (certainly by far the richest large one), yet in many ways (infrastructure, quality of administration, political culture, etc.) it feels more similar to a middle-income one.
"The richest poor country in the world" might be closer to it. As the rest of the threads under this post will reveal, we mostly agree that something is wrong with this country — but putting our finger on what that is can be challenging.
But healthcare? 50th percentile US healthcare is pretty good. It's 25th and under who get shafted.
Having a higher median income is all well and good, until you find it all eaten by education, healthcare, and transportation costs... In addition to less financially denominated costs. [1]
But eh, if you didn't need to take care of your kids, or yourself, you could theoretically afford more iPhones.
[1] Having lived in Canada, and the US, I can't put an exact dollar value on the stress of, for example, having to deal with the American healthcare system, but its non-zero.
It's a new sort of poverty, affluent and insecure at the same time, and it's probably not a stretch (given the content of the article we're commenting on) to say it's bad for health.
The average Dutch citizen might take less money home, but they also work 30% less, they won't face the threat of not having healthcare or a roof over their head, and they don't need to inhale car exhaust on a highway for an hour per day but take the bike instead. More money is evidently not the solution to everything. American society seems to be optimised around creating economic activity for its own sake.
edit: not really sure what the reflexive downvotes are for, the links between precarity, inequality, stress and biological harm in populations are well documented, see Sapolsky: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-ineq...
Everyone dies of something. The fact that US people die from things at a different ratio from other countries is interesting, relevant and uninformative on the topic of life expectancy. Picking out obesity - the fact that US obesity rate deaths are higher than the comparison countries doesn't tell us anything about life expectancy. Are they old fat people, or young fat people?
The article also can't rule out Simpson's paradox style effects. Hypothetically, say the US is just much better at bringing sickly babies into the world and nursing them on into their 70s it would have better care and worse life expectancy. I doubt that theory could even begin to explain what is going on here, but when comparing average statistics of huge and diverse populations effects like that can creep in very subtly. Statistics can be completely misleading if the treatment is short and only deals with part of the picture.
I'm feeling good about reading an article with lots of data, but this didn't do a good job of addressing the title matter.
Of course, there’s a deeper and more contentious kind of “why?” and it doesn’t go as deeply into that, other than to show some things that seem to correlate.
But I think it is useful, because one can’t defensively say the US doesn’t have a problem compared to other rich countries. The Nordic countries save early, sickly babies and nurse them along just as much as the US does, for instance.
The only thing I wish they’d have changed would be to indicate relative weight of the causes. Because obesity is an order of magnitude more lethal than homicide, for instance.
Do old obese people exist in the first place? What is the longevity record for an obese person?
Actually just the general stress that you have to work hard your whole life just to get-to/stay in middle class. Maybe that is related to the inequality part.
Is this valid: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/long-working-hours-shor...
It’s also interesting to break this down by ethnicity. Asians in the US are longer lived than people in rich Asian countries like Japan. Asians in California and New York have life expectancies over 87, even though they have slightly higher than average rates of lacking health insurance.
I would use the South or Rust Belt as a better reference.
In fact if you look at their data. Obesity/Overweight is the only factor. Not surprising given >70% are overweight.
Flipside, nothing here surprises me. The US governments actively subsidize unhealthy foods. Not to mention outright inform their people to eat unhealthy diets.
Worse than that, just look at your options for food in the USA. If you banned unhealthy foods and all current unhealthy food workers are banned for life from working in the food industry. You would be left with >90% of their food industry unemployed and practically unemployable.
What do you do with those >20 million people? Welfare system cant handle them. You might say unsubsidize these unhealthy foods and what happens? Fast food prices go way up and more people go unemployed. Same problem.
I’m asking because this is the sort of thing which gets discovered all the time. Even, or especially, because it sounds so implausible.
The primary source of injury in young people creating this situation? Car accidents. And remembering how me and my friends were behind the wheel at that age, this is completely unsurprising. Young people in many other countries do not drive nearly as much.
Everyone looks for medical reasons but it is largely fatal accident rates.
Here are traffic deaths by age group: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6806a8.htm. Let's pad those numbers up by a significant amount and assign 20 per 100,000 from birth, and remove those deaths from the life tables (ie let's say noone dies from traffic accidents in the USA). That still only lifts life expectancy by 1 year (from 78.6 to 79.6)
You can keep adding other parts of accidental deaths but: 1) they don't fit the story of USA dying more from driving 2) the leftovers are already below the accidental death rate from countries with much higher life expectancy 3) a big chunk of the rest is accidental falls which predominantly affects very old people so doesn't have a big impact on life expectancy
I wince when I hear 1 hour commute times. The risk of injury and death from driving 10k miles per year versus 25k miles per year is material in my opinion.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
He agrees with the linked article that lifestyle factors are what drives the worse health outcomes in the US relative to other wealthy countries. They're not primarily driven by differences in access to or effectiveness in health care. He also makes the case for a few other very unintuitive points:
* Health care spending is a direct function of national wealth. If a country gets richer it spends more on health care, and every country at every time in modern history spends about the same amount on health care as a function of its wealth.
* The US looks like an outlier in health care spending because GDP is not a perfect measure of wealth. Actual Individual Consumption is a less well-known but much more relevant measure of national wealth. AIC shows the US is more of an outlier in wealth, which makes its high health care spending less remarkable.
* There's no magic bullet. Single payer nations pay less than the US mostly because they are less wealthy and health care spending is a function of wealth. Other countries have better health outcomes mostly because of demographics and culture, which can't be fixed by the health care system. And even though finding obvious waste and inefficiency in the US health care system is easy, at a macro level it doesn't look like the US is remarkably less efficient than other rich countries, and most spending goes towards things that patients want.
So in addition to healthcare reform, the US needs public policy reform - to tackle obesity, prescription drug abuse and to tackle unskilled driving creating traffic deaths.
You go to your doctor, who then tries to treat you. But then has to fight an insurance company who wants treatment that isn't in your best interests or isn't covered by the employer plan.
You get home and discover your Doctor is out of network. Pay up. You spend a million years fighting the insurance company.
OR your insurance is good, so the doctor says, what the hell I will order that test that is nice to have. They'll cover it. Costs increase.
Or you go to the emergency room, run up bills for the hospital and leave without paying. The taxpayer foots the bill.
And the doctors pay through the teeth for their degrees and want a big return. They earn more than other countries in a significant way.
All the incentives are out of whack and not in the public's interest.
[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/12/03/why-us-lit...
[1] https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/medical_malpracti...
https://www.leveragerx.com/blog/medical-malpractice-insuranc...
A few years back I was reading articles on how doctors were changing specialties or retiring entirely due to the high cost of malpractice insurance. I'm not sure if the situation has changed since, however.
You can also get mri images done for very low cost of you pay cash.
[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
Unfortunately the US aggregate outcomes are dragged heavily down by an unhealthy population and high barriers to care for the uninsured.
My impression was that many if not most Americans would have to pay an excess (not sure of the American term; money paid by an insured party on using insurance) for any medical care with their work insurance. Is this not the case?
Add all these charges and fees up, you'll keep paying them until you hit your "maximum out of pocket." So as an example, I was hospitalized a few years back in December while on what would be considered a "good" healthcare plan. I paid my $1000 deductible, a $250 co-pay for emergency room care, and co-insurance of several hundred dollars. I stayed a single night in the hospital and received a CT scan. I was given Tylenol, released the next day, and referred to a specialist. I wound up seeing the specialist in January, so my deductible reset. I was given another CT scan, so I had to pay my $1000 deductible again. The total bill for the entire process pre-insurance was in the realm of $80,000. After insurance, I paid $5000, which was my entire life savings at the time. I didn't hit my maximum out of pocket for either year, so I got lucky in a way. I could have had to pay double what I did.
I feel this is never adequately priced into these discussions. everything about healthcare in the US is expensive and complicated, even if you "have insurance", even if you have expensive, seen-as-good-insurance.
Do you have a source for those statements?
There may also be an aspect of funny cost accounting there. One reason given for the rather high medical salaries in the US, for instance, is the fact that trainee doctors, dentists, etc tend to incur truly horrifying levels of student debt.
> Now, [US] physicians graduate with a median $194,000 in student debt.
This generally isn't the case in most developed countries, but in that case the state may be spending more on _education_.
The % of US population covered by health insurance is around 84%, compared with most other rich countries, which are all at 100%.
Additional, much of what you count as US health care spending is really health care administration - i.e. billing and finding reasons to deny care to the sick.
That was pre-Obamacare. 91-92% of Americans have medical insurance, whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid.
>compared with most other rich countries, which are all at 100%.
Nope. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers. The only such systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.
Japanese Americans for example have higher life expectancy than Japanese in Japan, and I expect the same would be true for Ethiopians.
This shows the superiority of the American system.
I need to second the previous comment that this article is either based on deception or ignorance.
Maybe this is crazy, but here is an explanation: legal immigrants are richer and more educated than average in their country of origin and thus have better outcomes after having immigrated.
My grandfather is living in Lincoln county WV (since before i even knew him), i know a lot of people in Huntington and Charleston, in fact most Americans i know live between there and Fayetteville, WV. I would be shocked if life expectancy there is higher than 70, especially if you're not in a fringe group.
>Japanese Americans for example have higher life expectancy than Japanese in Japan, and I expect the same would be true for Ethiopians.
Similarly, Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. (https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.
Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
That analysis is not by an expert, but by an MBA who is selling his own brand of "analysis" to the alt-right crowd.
In this case, he compares the white part of the US against their "ethnic cousins" without taking into account that just about every single western European country has 20% non-European immigrants who (as opposed to underprivileged US blacks) often aren't even native speakers...