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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I know I must sound like a broken record, but life expectancy is a poor proxy for quality of healthcare. There are many factors which impact life expectancy which have nothing to do with healthcare. For example, if you correct for the number of car accidents (which is high in the US due to the number of cars on the road), the US comes out near the top in terms of life expectancy.

The other thing is that to say that the US ranks 50th in life expectancy is useless without showing numbers. From what I've seen, the #1 country and the #50 country difference by less than 3 years. So is the number 50 ranked country really that much worse than the #1 country.

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I just copied the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article, which happpened to be about life expectancy which is often seen as a proxy for quality of healthcare. Fair or not.

Here are some other excerpts from the article:

- The United States is among the few industrialized nations in the world that does not guarantee access to health care for its population.

- lack of health insurance causes roughly 48,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States

- In 2007, 62.1% of filers for bankruptcies claimed high medical expenses.

- A 2013 study found that about 25% of all senior citizens declare bankruptcy due to medical expenses, and 43% are forced to mortgage or sell their primary residence.

These quotes are just from the first paragraph of the article... There are many more if you read it through.

For an outside observer it's blatantly obvious that you have a broken system, and it's inexlicable why you keep defending it.

You won't get any argument from me that the US healthcare system is broken (both the private and public systems).

However, using flimsy statistical arguememts to make the arguememt isn't helping anyone.

Btw, the 62% of bankruptcies stat is also misleading. Whether the person had $10 or $100k medical debt is included. It's not surprising that if someone went bankrupt due to a failed business they wouldn't pay their medical bills either. Thus for many of those 62%, medical expenses had nothing to do with their bankruptcies.

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