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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

They are not world leading. Number of doctors is not a metric of how good your medicine is.

If you look at most good and great novel drugs and madical devices, they mostly are designed and made in the US or Europe. Mostly US.

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Why are patented drugs or medical devices your metric for a good health system. Those just sound like ways for people to profit from a sick population. If we had better health outcomes for citizens, I would cite that.

All the science cuba used to develop the vaccine is american or european.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." -Newton

All science is based on the work of others, and it always has been.

Woah

It seems like an awfully convenient metric too, just pick the thing that western nations are guaranteed to have and the poorer nations can’t have (and forget about China).

I see a little chicken and egg problem here. This reminds of Stephen J. Gould’s Mismeasure of a Man. People would say that intelligence could be seen by measuring the size of the skull—knowing off course before hand that white people had the largest skull—and hence were the most intelligent (!) Until of course they actually measured the skulls properly, and found out it wasn’t any bigger, then they just moved on to the next metric that conveniently showed that white people were more intelligent.

>> If you look at most good and great novel drugs and madical devices, they mostly are designed and made in the US or Europe. Mostly US.

Citation needed!

The US is so far ahead of other countries, it invents more new novel drugs than the next 5 countries combined.

And then poor countries enjoy the cheap generic versions of these drugs, basically subsidized by the US.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1a70c72f3bbb329d1dfee4...

The US is incapable of making medications accessible to its own population. And not even willing to provide broad health insurance. That's not a country with a working or high quality medical system.

Does the chart you link say anything about generic versions?

Pleas link to the original source rather than a picture on a CDN that may have been altered.

Additionally, where is Cuba on this chart? Does a new, poorly performing pill (eg: a failed heart drug resubmitted to the FDA as an ED pill) counts as a newly discovered medication?

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-cuba-bec...

It is ahead in development but way behind in providing that healthcare to it's citizens.

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit...

Life expectancy in Cuba is higher than that of the US (72.5 vs. 71.9). Health workers have eliminated polio, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and diphtheria. Malnutrition incidence amount 1-15 years olds is 0.7% compared with 5% in the US[0]

[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2315760/#:~:text=Life%20expe....

If the US didn't subsidize all the other countries, you'd see a much different picture. It's easy to provide better healthcare, when someone else is paying for all R&D and manufacturing.

Let's be entirely honest here, the US could provide health care for all, in the same way the NHS operates in the UK. It is not the R&D costs that are preventing this, it is a very powerful medical insurance lobby that prevents it.

And no, it is not easier to provide better healthcare, even without doing the R&D.A higher GDP is what enables better provision of healthcare and the US has the highest GDP and is in the top 10 per capita, Cuba is at 87th.

GDP PPP is more appropriate. Cuba has a fairly good PPP per capita GDP.

Your 2nd source is from 1990 and is at odds with the CIA World Factbook, the first source, which says that current life expectancy at birth is 80.43 in US, 79.41 in Cuba: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/life-expectancy...

They're both basically similar in both years, which is astounding given the vastly higher material wealth of the US.

Nice to know that both have increased a lot since 1990, though! I thought 72 sounded a bit young.

That's a straw man and off topic from the discussion which is what countries has the most pharmaceutical advances. Everyone knows that the US health care system is awful compared to most other companies unless you're rich or have good company provided insurance plan, which covers maybe 65-75% of the population, the rest are told to pound sand and go bankrupt or just not get any care at all.

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