1 - As inode points out life expectancy is (mostly) not a measure of health care in a country (still less of the health care payment system).
2 - See nationalreview.com combined with
"A related thought, to the extent that more early and low birth-weight American babies are recorded as live births it not only affects the stats for infant mortality, but it also makes the US's state for life expectancy seem worse relative to other countries. Averaging in babies that die 2 days from birth has an impact on life expectancy compared to not counting them at all."
Message 30920419
3 - The average life expectancy of various ethnic and racial groups in the US exceeds, the average of the same groups elsewhere. If you want to toss out Africa (and African Americans) because of Africa is much poorer, its still at least about the same.
4 - Another point worth making is that people die for other reasons than health. For example, people die because of car accidents and violent crime. A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.
It’s great that the Japanese eat more sushi than we do, and that they settle their arguments more peaceably. But these things don’t have anything to do with socialized medicine.
forbes.com
Message 29242535
5 - If you try to say that the system of health care payment is significantly "better" in one country than in another, and you use statistics like life expectancy and infant mortality to support your claim, you only have solid support if you can either show that the difference in numbers from each country is almost completely due to the difference in health care payment systems, or you have to find all the other significant factors and adjust for them. The problem with such an effort is that it would seem that those stats are not primary determined by how health care payments are conducted, and that there are so many things that could effect the stats that it would hard to even identify all the important factors let alone accurately adjust for all of them.
Message 27599403
Moving from life expectancy to % of GDP spent on health care, you are in one sense on much more solid ground. The US does spend a larger percentage of its GDP on health care than most other countries.
But that's only part of the battle. You haven't shown, or in the post I'm replying to even attempted to show, why that is, and that if health care was paid for differently in the US, along the lines of say France or the UK, or Canada, that it would be much cheaper here.
And no its not the case that they all (either the three countries I mentioned, or European countries, or OECD countries, etc.) pay for health care the same way. They don't have "a radically different system than ours", they have a whole bunch of different systems, different not just from the US, but also within any of those groups.
Its also not the case that the only important difference in health care cost is how payments are managed.
The US is wealthier than most other countries, and than any other large country, (which leaves a larger amount, not just in dollars but even in percentage of GDP, this isn't just trying to project some assumption, evidence supports the point that as national per capita wealth rises, a larger percentage of that wealth is spent on health care). The US has different health care and legal culture that drive more defensive medicine. The US has a higher rate of violent crime and car accidents than most other countries. Americans are on the average more obese then other countries. That's just a start, serious thought here could bring up a number of other differences that are clearly relevant, and a huge number that might be. |
