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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

Please don't abuse "objectively." There's no objective measure of what "working OK" even means in the first place, let alone objective information that says whether or not we meet that bar.

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.

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If you pay much more and get worse results that's objectively not OK. It means the system is inefficient and could be easily improved saving lives and money.

> 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.

> 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.

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...."

> EU life expectancy was 81.7 in 2024. Two years makes one of them OK and the other not?

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

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