The length of lives, unadjusted, isn't a usable metric for health care. AT ALL. If you adjust the statistics to remove fatal injuries (as you must in order to compare life expectancies) the US has the highest of all OECD countries:
I don't know why I waste my time posting with you...............
August 25, 2009, 1:50 PM ET
Violence, Traffic Accidents and U.S. Life Expectancy
By Matthew Dalton
 If you ignore relatively high U.S. rates of violence, traffic accidents and the like, does the U.S. have the world’s highest life expectancy?
Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and outspoken opponent of Democratic health-care reform schemes, made that argument last week on the Daily Show.
If true, it would undermine a compelling rationale for health-care reform: The U.S. spends by far the most on health care of any country in the world, yet its average life expectancy ranks below many other countries, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The argument appears to be based on a 2006 report written by the economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider and published by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. The report, which analyzes the OECD’s life-expectancy data from 1980-1999, uses a statistical model called a regression in an attempt to adjust for the effects of traffic accidents, suicides, homicides and falls from the OECD’s rankings. The report finds that “adjusted” U.S. life-expectancy rises to first, from an unadjusted ranking of 19th of 29 countries.
But the OECD itself took the trouble to counter this finding in print. In a footnote to its 2008 economic survey of the U.S., the agency says that Ohsfeldt and Schneider’s estimates are based in part on GDP. If you don’t factor in GDP, the U.S. ranks 17th in the world for life expectancy when the high U.S. rate of fatal injuries is ignored, the OECD said.
Back in 2007, Ohsfeldt told the WSJ that he and Schneider were “not trying to say that these are the precisely correct life-expectancy estimates. We’re just trying to show that there are other factors that affect life-expectancy-at-birth estimates that people quote all the time.”
Neither McCaughey, Ohsfeldt nor Schneider responded to requests for comment for this post.
blogs.wsj.com
And the reason we have so many fatal injuries is because you asshats. Yes, its your fault. |
