Richest Americans Die Earlier Than the Poorest Europeans | Hacker News Reader

Richest Americans Die Earlier Than the Poorest Europeans

vice.com

32 pointsLtWorf38 comments

This is surprising as it goes against the what I've heard in the past.

The 10,000 foot summary I had was: Americans are starting to die earlier, but the age expectancy of the wealthiest Americans is longer than of people in most countries.

This article says that even the American top 1% die earlier than people in other countries. However, the lack of numbers makes me question this.

Also, the cited reason is socialized healthcare. In the US, the top 1% has access to healthcare through their employers of being able to pay on their own, so it is surprising that this would be a major factor.

I think this article is lacking the details that would make me take the claims seriously.

It could be diet.

It must be the diet and proably the general more stressy life style. Anytime I'm coming back from a business trip to the states, I feel bloated like a hot air baloon. Not sure what they put in their food. Generally, you get this fast food crap everywhere and it's almost impossible to have a normal (what a European would consider so) meal during lunch break. It even starts at their high schools with super unhealthy ham and cheese sandwhiches and what not. But it's not only that. Last time I bought some apples in a grocery store and holy shit, those apples tasted like some chemical bomb. They looked really nice though....

> It even starts at their high schools with super unhealthy ham and cheese sandwhiches and what not

What do you mean, Europeans don't eat jambon-beurre?

Wikipedia:

> More than three million jambon-beurre sandwiches are sold in France each day, more than any other kind of sandwich, except for hamburgers.

I think it is less about the ham and butter itself, but about all the chemical ingredients that are there to make the food look nice, conserve it and make it tastier, that are simply forbidden in Europe due to their effects on health.

Not to mention the quality of the bread itself.

I think one should also keep in mind that the linked study covers a 12 year period (2010 to 2022) which includes the covid years.

But that should probably bias the number in the opposite direction, if at all. The 1% should have had better chances to survive covid.

The usual explanation is it is more dangerous to live in America e.g. homicides are much spread than in Europe. It is so much more dangerous compared to Europe which always had a war starting every 15 years after 1990.

Also the health system in America is fucked. This isn't a question of socialised vs privatised system as all health systems in Europe have a mix of both. (England is a big outlier here).

> The usual explanation is it is more dangerous to live in America e.g. homicides are much spread than in Europe

Not enough to have a significant effect on life expectancy.

> This isn't a question of socialised vs privatised system as all health systems in Europe have a mix of both. (England is a big outlier here).

You mean the UK, not England, and there is a lot of private medicine here, and the NHS outsources a lot to the private sector (including almost all GP services).

It is different in terms of funding and organisation from other developed countries.

> This isn't a question of socialised vs privatised system as all health systems in Europe have a mix of both. (England is a big outlier here)

In what way is the UK an outlier?

Are you saying that there's no privatised healthcare in the UK?

If so, what would you call:

BUPA https://www.bupa.co.uk/

Vitality https://www.vitality.co.uk/

I presume the poor quality of the lifestyle, food and environment in USA has an impact, regardless of how much you can spend on medicines to try and offset that.

Don't 1% rich people die of rich people causes?

i.e. Easy and unending access to drugs, and or party related diseases?

Easy and rather unending access to drugs is not that hard to achieve. One might even argue it is easier to achieve as a poor person.

Besides what is a party related disease? Something like an STD, or more akin to a manic episode

Cancer, stroke, dementia; death doesn't care about your numbers, it cares about you

I'd argue that a rich person has more of a reason to develop a severe addiction if the quality of their stuff is more pure and comes with less of a risk

difficulties in life and genetics are more of a reason to decelop a severe addiction. Quality is probably not so much of importance - people still smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol.

It feels like we forgot about the opiod epidemic, meth, crack..

Anyhow, I think this derailed enough. I just wanted to point out the weird protestant views of op.

Prince Rogers Nelson and Michael Jackson both had personal doctors who both played a role in their deaths, with drugs that they gave. Similarly Matthew Perry.

This is not an option for ordinary people.

Same. My impression was that if you can pay for it, American healthcare is unrivaled.

And by “pay for it”, I don’t mean the typical employer provided insurance and visiting the usual doctors.

I mean high end concierge care that starts at five figures minimum to buy in annually before any other expenses.

A PC doctor is just a phone call away, and they’ll use theirs and their organization’s connections and resources to get you whatever additional care you need quickly and effectively.

The linked study is weird and seems to not justify the headline.

The basically seem to have taken a group of rich Americans and poor Europeans and looked at what percentage died in a given period but didn't take into account how old they were.

Which is an odd way to study things.

Yeah lot of papers in... What do you even call this field of study... are very strange and use weak methodologies. And God forbid they try and do statistics.

I think it's specifically the 25% poorest French, German and Dutch, not poorest Europeans in general.

At least from the Vice article, not read the cited paper.

The conclusion reached by the researchers is the same one you’re probably already thinking—the same one that a lot of you probably don’t want to admit, purely for ideological reasons: socialized healthcare.

F*ing lies.

There is no indication of the researchers explicitly connecting socialised healthcare. They didn't collect data to draw such a conclusion. They collected income+location(+other bits) vs life expectancy, but not healthcare type vs life expectancy.

And in reality, I believe Europeans also walk notably more than US-Americans, which might equally well have an impact. And a whole bunch of other things. There might be studies on it. This is not one of them.

The referenced study is from the New England Journal of Medicine, which is pretty respectable, and is a large study. It says the wealthiest 25% of Americans have a worse mortality than the poorest 25% of Europeans.

They have health insurance managed by government, not for profit industry.

Nothing to do with communism, as some of the hacker bros are venting. That's just propaganda to keep people slaving at shitty jobs for less pay and lousy benefits.

   a rat race promoted by rich sociopaths, specifically designed to have the underclasses ripping each other apart while they live lavish lives that don’t even amount to longer lives.

That could also describe Socialized healthcare except the money is spread on more people working useless jobs and having more normal life

   a lot of you probably don’t want to admit, purely for ideological reasons: socialized healthcare.

A yes of course, there are no rational arguments against communism, it’s not like we have austrian economics, classic liberal philosophy, game theory, public choice, experience from the past and basic common sense.

You seem to think communism is the only alternative to the American system? Given how differently various countries run, and communism is almost dead (even China is not really communist anymore) its clearly not true.

The US (and the rest of the world) is run increasingly on oligarchic rather than free market lines anyway, so that is the real comparison.

Ah no that’s not what I said. But a lot of healthcare systems in Europe are close to communism yes (but they’re hybrid, there’s also some markets mechanism)

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

There's a gaping conceptual chasm between "publicly funded" and "communist".

And there’s a big chasm between the system we have in europe and simply being “publicly funded”, so you are also simplifying reality

Universal healthcare is just an mandatory insurance scheme with an efficient centralized bureaucracy. You know, insurance, that thing that prevents markets from falling over when something goes wrong. We also have fun things like bankruptcy, which means some people don't get payed back. Should we reintroduce debter prisons to get rid of all the communism in the system?

It varies a lot. Compare the UK, Germany and Singapore. Very different in the level of centralisation.

It's different because private insurance and hospitals want to make profit

You think public insurance don't? There is a difference between making profits and placing profits above everything else.

Extracting resources and giving less in exchange is a form of making profit. Socialized healthcare does that too.

How is an insurance backed up with taxes, related to the concept of abolishing private ownership?

Communism doesn't want to abolish private property so perhaps try to know more about the thing you're talking about before lecturing.

Sigh. What is your definition for communism then? I'm curious to hear that.

It's about the means of production… not about all property.

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