demographics in the US are very different than Australia, I suspect those in the bottom 1/3rd of US health drag it down significantly.
Could this also (partially) be explained by the cost of healthcare? Something like a downwards spiral where average people end up poor either due to direct costs of healthcare or neglecting their own healthcare due to cost?
- greater usage of surgeries and prescriptions, leading to greater exposure to medical malpractice (the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.)
- higher birthrate. more pregnancies.
- less cultural tolerance of abortion. Greater willingness to take on risky pregnancies
- single parent homes (people with less family support)
- ethnicities which are more susceptible to certain disease and lifestyle risks
- greater exposure to crime in impoverished areas
- more life time spent traveling in cars
- more restricted access to health insurance (as you said only accessing healthcare in dire emergency)
The US is a different world than most countries which tend to be geographically tight and culturally homogenous. It's very difficult to make comparisons, not to mention differences in data collection and reporting ethics.
Not to downplay the malpractice problem, but this doesn’t sound remotely plausible. Do you have some sources to back up this claim?
I googled around a bit and it appears to come from some sloppy misuse of statistics in a journal one time, plus internet amplification.
> The CDC’s published mortality statistics, however, count only the “underlying cause of death,” defined as the condition that led a person to seek treatment.
Because of this political choice the information comes from 3rd parties digging into the accidents category.
https://www.propublica.org/article/study-urges-cdc-to-revise...
> The US is a different world than most countries which tend to be geographically tight and culturally homogenous
I am not sure how much you know about Australia, but homogeneity and geographically tight is definitely not how you would describe it.
So, if this was the issue, you'd probably expect outcomes to be better in less diverse, physically smaller US states. Looking at, say, life expectancy by state (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_map_...) doesn't seem to bear this out, really; on your theory you'd probably expect, say, West Virgina to be handily beating California or Texas.
Also, of course, _Australia_, which started the thread, could hardly be called either geographically tight or culturally homogenous. Australia is roughly the size of the contiguous United States.
The point about less diverse is that’s it’s easier to operate health programs which match the values of the population.
Not that small ethnic group = healthy.
West Virginia is extremely poor.