Dying in the third-world from cancer means you die. Dying in the US from cancer means you probably will bankrupt your family first, and ultimately die faster due to the financial burden/stress.
The US system sucks in a lot of ways, but it works OK for most Americans. If you're very poor, you'll have Medicaid and it'll cost you nothing. If you're an average middle class person, you'll have decent health insurance and your costs will be affordable. There's a slice of people in the middle who don't qualify for medicaid but don't have decent health insurance, and they're going to have serious financial trouble. But most Americans aren't in that situation.
There's a tendency to look at the worst situations and assume it applies to everyone. How we treat the least fortunate is extremely important and I won't defend the US here, but there's a pretty big gulf between a significant minority who can face massive financial burdens from medical care, and "it's basically a third-world country...."
It's objectively not "working OK" for most Americans, especially when you consider how much you spend for subpar results.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
Now you can blame it on bad lifestyle, addictions, car culture, crime rate, etc. All true, and idiotic healthcare system is indirectly influencing all of that.
Badly controlled medical system with bad incentives caused opioid crisis.
Bad incentives (government and healthcare system earning money on people getting sick instead of losing money on them) also makes it less likely for the system to focus on healthy work-life balance (paid maternity leave, paid vacations, good preventive care, education for healthy lifestyle) and instead focuses on expansive aftercare.
There's about 500 000 medical bankrupcies in US per year. That's huge.
Also - medical debt (not even bankrupcy necessarily) contributes significantly to homelessness:
https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/medical-debt-home...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32513034/
> two-thirds [of homeless interviewed] reporting current medical debt. Almost half reported trouble paying medical bills for themselves or family members. Almost one-third believed medical debt was in part responsible for their current housing situation. More than half with medical debt incurred this debt while they were covered under insurance. People who had trouble paying medical bills experienced a more recent episode of homelessness 2 years longer than those who did not have such trouble, even after controlling for race, education, age, gender, and health status
The US healthcare financing system is a disaster and needs reform. But if you look deeper into the alarmist reports about medical bankruptcies you'll find that they're lying with statistics to push a political narrative.
> The article by Himmelstein et al1 in this issue of the The American Journal of Medicine documents that health care expenses were the most common cause of bankruptcy in the United States in 2007, accounting for 62% of US bankruptcies compared with 8% in 1981.2
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
> Table 1 displays debtors’ responses regarding the (often multiple) contributors to their bankruptcy. The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.
I find this framing to be extremely misleading. "Medical bankruptcies" suggests something like someone gets cancer and insurance doesn't cover the treatment and they end up a million bucks in debt to the hospital. But the numbers above seem to cover someone who got fired, bet all their savings on black at the roulette table, and also visited the dentist.
EU life expectancy was 81.7 in 2024. Two years makes one of them OK and the other not? What do we call a place like Hungary which is quite a bit below the US here? Or maybe it's OK because they don't spend as much?
I also said for most Americans. Bad life expectancy is concentrated in the poorest Americans. Which is not a good thing to say about this country, but it does mean that most Americans live longer.
Again, I'm not a defender of our system. But the average American gets decent care and is not bankrupted by major illness.
> Bad life expectancy is concentrated in the poorest Americans. Which is not a good thing to say about this country, but it does mean that most Americans live longer.
I've seen this defence many times, in different contexts, and it always strikes me as very strange. Why do you assume most Americans are rich? And why do you assume they are the ones that matter? Very weird. But let's take it at face value.
Looking at the graph of life expectancy vs percentile of income - US seems to be below 80 years for 50th percentile:
https://preview.redd.it/at-every-income-level-us-americans-l...
Which would make your point false regardless of the weirdness of it.
Another interesting graph: https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8...
I would not call it "OK".
> What do we call a place like Hungary which is quite a bit below the US here?
I could do the trick you did, sayign that Hungary has the same life expectancy as Illinois, and richer parts of EU has better life expectancy, therefore Hungary doesn't matter. That would be disingenious tho. It does matter, and healthcare in Hungary obviously isn't doing OK. It is more cost-effective than US tho.
Seriously? The quote you're responding to divides Americans up into "the poorest" and everyone else. By definition, most Americans are not "the poorest." I'm not assuming anything.
This comment tree is very frustrating. People don't seem to understand the idea of metrics, or "objectively," toss out sophomoric "America bad" nonsense like, "you don't get paid vacation" (almost everyone does), "you go bankrupt if you get cancer" (almost nobody does), "you work more than other rich countries" (we don't), and act like any correction is a equivalent to saying we're the best.
There are real criticisms to be made about the US. There are ways in which the US is behind other wealthy nations and we shouldn't be. But it is very much not "basically a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one...."
No. We call the place with higher maternal mortality, higher infant mortality, huge number of medical bankruptices, higher untreated chronical diseases due to insurance issues etc. despite spending significantly higher on healthcare not OK
"significant minority".
But sure, the poor should just stop being poor.