Did it ever cross your mind that every country on that list could come up with extenuating circumstances that hurt their longevity?
Of course. Except I wouldn't call them "extenuating circumstances". Your starting with the assumption that its all about the health care insurance system, and then deciding whether your accept adjustments for other circumstances. In fact many of these other reasons, and others that haven't even been mentioned in this conversation, might be bigger factors than any difference in health care insurance.
Put simply life expectancy is a very poor measure to use to determine the quality of a health insurance system, because there is no reason to think that it is predominantly determined by the difference between different health care systems.
However, shouldn't there be a corresponding increase in the lifespan for men?
I'm not sure how "should" or "shouldn't" fits in to an issue like this. But absent any other factors I suppose you could expect one. The problem is there is a million very hard to isolate factors. The person you quoted tried to finesse the issue by just looking at the gap, but the gap doesn't show much at all. If things are bad for men, then the stats should show that. Maybe they do to a slight extent in the countries he's considered, but obviously he didn't consider that enough, or he wouldn't have had any reason to try to finesse the issue by considering the gap.
A similar distortion is in the international rankings for health care that many have been using to argue that socialized medicine (or "single payer"/socialized health insurance) is better than what we have now. They consider the difference in quality between different people itself to be a measure of quality. So if health care gets better for the rich without getting better for the poor to the same extent, the countries ranking goes down. It doesn't matter that for the average, or for the typical/median person its getting better, or even that for the worst off its getting better. If the "gap" increases the rank goes down.
Now its one thing if you want to make such "gaps" the issue themselves, but its unreasonable, and perhaps even dishonest, to present data about a "gap" and then use it to suggest the system as a whole is worse. Measure the average, measure the median, if you want to focus on them measure the worst off (but then make it explicit that your talking about the worst off, not the average or typical person), and maybe you can get some interesting or useful data, but don't pretend that measuring changes in some real or imagined gap is more important that what is really happening to people in all the different groups. |
