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There are already statistics showing that the US has the longest life expectancy in the West if you exclude fatal trauma.
Or maybe that just means socialized countries treat fatal trauma more effectively than the US.
Or maybe that means that Americans drive far more miles and auto-accidents are a leading cause of fatal trauma.
If we want to look at how fatal trauma is treated I’d say we have to look more at morgues and funeral homes than clinics or hospitals.
Penn Jillette and Ron Paul will be on Larry King live, debating health care.
Penn Jillette and Ron Paul disagree about health care?
That’s very odd. Usually CNN has two socialists debating a topic.
I don’t think they disagree. Who cares what other scumbags are on the debate panel. I think there will be a total of 6 panelists.
Giant fan of Penn Jillette here. Thanks for the heads up!
Here’s an other very interesting study:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13429
An excerpt:
“Does Canada’s publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? We show that the efficacy of health care systems cannot be usefully evaluated by comparisons of infant mortality and life expectancy. We analyze several alternative measures of health status using JCUSH (The Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health) and other surveys. We find a somewhat higher incidence of chronic health conditions in the U.S. than in Canada but somewhat greater U.S. access to treatment for these conditions. Moreover, a significantly higher percentage of U.S. women and men are screened for major forms of cancer. Although health status, measured in various ways is similar in both countries, mortality/incidence ratios for various cancers tend to be higher in Canada. The need to ration resources in Canada, where care is delivered “free”, ultimately leads to long waits. In the U.S., costs are more often a source of unmet needs. We also find that Canada has no more abolished the tendency for health status to improve with income than have other countries. Indeed, the health-income gradient is slightly steeper in Canada than it is in the U.S. [...]
It is commonly supposed that a publicly funded single payer health care system will deliver better health outcomes, and distribute health resources more fairly than a multi-payer system with a large private component.
Health status is similar in both countries. But Canada has no more abolished the tendency for health status to improve with income than have other countries. Indeed, the health-income gradient is more prominent in Canada than it is in the U.S. The need to ration when care is delivered “free” ultimately leads to long waits or unavailable services and to unmet needs. In the U.S. costs are more often a source of unmet needs. But costs may be more easily overcome than the absence of services.”
An other study:
http://www.epionline.org/study_detail.cfm?sid=122
“The authors look at the utilization of certain services— in particular, screening for cancer—and find that the uninsured may indeed receive less care than those who are privately insured. However, when compared with screening rates for Canadians (who largely receive healthcare coverage through a nationalized, single-payer system), the uninsured in the United States actually compare favorably. To further determine whether lack of coverage means lack of service, the authors also report estimates of the dollar amounts of healthcare resources obtained by the uninsured in total. The estimates indicate that on a per-capita basis, the uninsured receive about 40 percent of the amount of health resources received by those with insurance. [...]
Finally, the authors show that while the uninsured use fewer health services, they still receive a large amount of care, and there is little discernable difference in mortality based on insurance status.”
If Americans live a tad shorter than other Westerners is it because Americans prefer to live short, exciting lives than live long, boring lives? Or Americans have a higher degree of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurialism requires a love of risk-taking and danger which increases the odds of dying younger? After all, if you look at the places in the world where living over a century is practically a given, you’ll see these people have boring, repetitive lives and only eat small meals of only healthful ingredients.
Admit it, most Americans want to live hard, play hard, get drunk, get laid and if it shaves off 20 to 50 years over a pure and true life then so be it.
it thought americans spend most of their (little) free time in church…
You are right, insofar as Americans *also* go to church. However, they do it for the same reason the Irish do: to atone for all of the awful stuff they did that weekend.
Or maybe there is just a hollow moral middle in our country…
Paging Pat Buchanan!
How much of the statistic includes dead gang-bangers. They usually die in their teens-20s which skew the stat.
U.S. health care providers are not tasked with increasing the life expectancy of the population. They are paid enormous sums to treat the sick and injured – after they become sick and injured. As I see it, it makes no sense to use life expectancy as a measure of the effectiveness of health care spending.
I see a fallacy in connecting life expectancy to the apparatus of medical care. Correlation does not equal causation. In fact one could argue that life expectancy will decrease in coming decades due to the obesity epidemic which is behavioral and not related to health care apparatus.
I’m still waiting for the only study that will conclusively answer the relevant questions about life expectancy:
- How long do French-Americans live versus the French in France?
- How long do Swedish-Americans live versus Swedes in Sweden?
- What about Arab-Americans, African-Americans, etc.?
We already know the answer to one of these paired sets. Those Japanese who supposedly have the longest life expectancies on Earth? They don’t live as long as Japanese-Americans.
When we’ve got that canard retired, there will be no need to resort to excuses about lifestyle, diet, etc.
Mr. Boudreaux, thanks for the information. I had sent you an email some days ago for which this “new” information provides a somewhat sufficient answer.
That aside, though there is a bit of an overlap of information, this nice little op-ed piece by Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford’s Hoover Institution does a nice job of providing some references that not only show that the US provides some of the best care in the industrialized world but that most of the people in “competing” countries also want major reforms to their systems.
I do have a couple more questions.
The first is regarding the higher health care expenditures for the US versus those of other countries. Given that we DO have higher survival rates for cancers than Europeans and Canadians, better access to treatments for chronic diseases than Canadians, better access to preventative screenings than Canadians, a lower “health-income gradient” disparity than Canada, lower wait times than people in Canada and the UK, more access to CT and MRI scans than people in much of the rest of the world, and that we produce more health care innovation than much of the rest of the world, would it be fair to say that a given portion of the higher expenditures are due to the fact that in many respects the US system is in fact better; that “we” are, to a degree, getting “our” money’s worth?
The second depends upon the first. Supposing that a given portion of the higher expenditures are due to the fact that in many respects the US system is in fact better, is there any way to estimate what percentage of those higher expenditures correlate to the better results and aspects of our system?
It would seem to me that if outcomes are to be the determinant of whether a health care system is “good” or “bad” AND that we are suffering from many health problems that negatively affect our life expectancy because of lifestyle choices throughout the years and social problems that are largely out of any one person’s control AND that we are still, despite the fact that so many people don’t have insurance and that we are, seemingly from birth, already so much more unhealthy than people in other countries and thus putting even greater strain on our health care system, getting all of these great results (even the life expectancy statistics so widely touted are highly suspect because they don’t control for non-health care related factors), then reforming the system in any way (like negatively affecting people’s access to preventative care, screening for health problems, and treatment for cancers and chronic health problems) that has the potential to negatively affect many of the ways in which the US system is better than those around the world and will leave us with a health care system that actually IS worse than those of other countries around the world (sorry for the run-on sentence).
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