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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (348687)	8/28/2007 4:45:56 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573433

Some countries have higher suicide rates than the US (clearly Japan does) others have lower. Just throwing in the suicide issue might not be enough to counteract the larger number of accidental deaths and homicides, in fact there is even some chance it moves the issue slightly further in the direction of the US having normal (for advanced countries) or even high life expectancy. Adjusting for the accidental deaths and homicides (which together are higher than suicides in most, probably all countries) the US comes out on top, not just ok. At the very least suicide adds one more additional complication (and we could each probably come up with others), that makes simply relying on the raw data even less reliable. You also have the fact that people in the US are on the average fatter than other developed countries. This will tend to lower life expectancy but doesn't have a lot to do with the health care system, and it wasn't considered in the adjustment that put US life expectancy on top. -- "...One often hears variations on Krugman's argument—that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren't academic—homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don't die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country. And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation..." city-journal.org