On Life Expectancy in America

I love it when people bring up life expectancy in the healthcare debate as it is perhaps the easiest myth to debunk.

Good catch by Ken Willis. The data that I found in a quick Google search are from 2004. In that year the homicide rate in France, per 100,000 persons, was 1.64 — which puts the U.S homicide rate at about 4.5 time higher than that of France.

Perhaps more recent data from France show that the homicide rate there has fallen substantially, but, like Mr. Willis, I doubt that it has fallen by enough to make it only one-eighth that of the U.S.

There is no argument — including the “% of GDP claim” — that justifies the further enslavement of doctors and healthcare providers and massive looting of Americans, all for purposes of granting unearned health care benefits to Democratic voters.

If someone discovered that we were spending much more than the rest of the world for cotton clothing, no one would entertain the notion that this would justify a return to the chattel slavery of the 19th century southern U.S. states.

The real statistic that deserves investigation is not how our medical spending stacks up against the rest of the world — it's how our spending has exploded since the inception of the FDA, Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, mandatory Emergency room treatments, state insurance mandates, HIPPA, the GMPs, etc.

The investigation would show a classic statist pincer movement: Destroy a given (mostly) free market by driving up demand while simultaneously reducing/eliminating competition and imposing crippling restrictions on supply — then point to the inevitable rise in prices and scream, “See! The free market doesn't work!”

Whether Obama will get away with his claim that he can walk on water and heal the sick, free of charge, if only we will surrender the last vestiges of our freedom, remains to be seen. That he can deliver that promise with a straight face is quite an achievement in the history of deception.

I believe Thomas Sowell pointed out a few weeks ago that Mormons have a life expectancy several years longer than the rest of the U.S. population. Great example. Most people understand that factors other than health care contribute to that stat.

Great comment Michael. I agree.

One problem is that their definition of the free market is slightly different. Those distrusting of the free market think free market only means privately owned or profit driven. They don't realize other important characteristics of the free market, like the freedom to choose and make value-based decisions using your own resources.

When someone blames the free market or says it failed, I usually ask for their definition of 'free market'.

According to the FBI,

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expand...

There were 14,180 murders in the United States in 2008. The U.S. population in 2008 is estimated to have been 303,824,640 in 2008

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-wo...

giving the U.S. a murder rate of 4.1 in 2008. If France's murder rate was 1.64 in 2004 [I believe it was higher than that in 2008, closer to 2.0], then the U.S. murder rate in 2008 is 2.5 times that of France in 2004. If I am correct about France's 2008 murder rate, the U.S. rate is roughly twice that of France.

The problems that need to be recognized in comparing homicide rates from one country to another are numerous. For example, out of the 14,180 Americans in 2008 who became murder victims, 6,782 (47%) were African Americans. Source: FBI Website, above..

This is off the topic of life expectancy but it does show that comparing any statistic between the U.S. and other countries has problems of its own. Other countries have their own way of recording [or not recording] data and it is not always easy for us to track how they do it.

continued: “In other words, the figures in Table 1-5 are not U.S. life expectancies adjusted for fatal injuries, but rather a model that assumes that both the relationship of life expectancy to per capita GDP and injuries in the U.S. follow OECD trends. That is – they are falsely giving the U.S. credit for having the same basic life expectancy as other other high GDP OECD countries, when in fact it is markedly lower. Commenter Guest at http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/07/per-capit...

You are defending the most wasteful and inefficient system in the world.

What do you expect to happen to a market when:

1) Roughly 50% of all the market's participants on the purchasing side are relieved of any financial responsibility for their purchases, thereby destroying any incentive to shop for the best value for the dollars being spent or to consider the most cost-effective way of dealing with their condition — and also thereby reducing any incentive to compete among doctors and hospitals.

2) The agency — Medicare and Medicaid — that assumes the financial responsibility for this 50% has access to unlimited government funds (i.e. taxpayer dollars or government debt) and thus has no incentive to police for fraud — no incentive to care what anything costs — and no incentive to tole.

3) That same agency — though it has no actual incentive to police for fraud or to care what anything wants — is nonetheless run by power-hungry bureaucrats who, in the name of “cost control”, push off on the providers (the doctors) over 130,000 pages of Medicare rules and regulations — rules so onerous and complicated that doctors that accept Medicare patients report that they must spend at least ONE FULL DAY per week on nothing but Medicare paperwork and must employ, on average, two additional clerical assistance to help in complying with those rules.

4) Another agency, state governments, gives in to special interest lobbying and forces ALL insurance policies sold by insurance companies in that state to include benefits such as alcohol rehabilitation programs, mental health programs, maternity benefits, etc, and demands that ALL such policies are sold at the same price — which means that those that want these benefits get them primarily at the expense of those who don’t want them.

And if you think you can just buy a cheaper policy from another state — a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t contain certain benefits you know you’ll never use — well, tough luck, because the states with these mandates generally have laws prohibiting you from purchasing from other states.

5) Another agency, the FDA, adds millions to the costs of new drugs by spending years approving drugs after drug companies have already spent years on double-blind studies proving the drugs work.

6) That same agency — which has zero experience in manufacturing and generally employs people that know nothing about manufacturing — nevertheless promulgates a vast set of regulations known as “Good Manufacturing Practices” that forces those manufacturing medical devices to create thousands of pages of written procedures, audits, etc., thereby driving up the costs of all manner of medical devices.

This massive set of regulations, in addition to driving up the costs of existing manufacturers, also constitutes a huge “barrier to entry” to any new firms that might wish to compete with existing firms, thereby reducing the competition in the field of medical device production.

7) Still yet another agency — the tort court system and the trial lawyers — forces doctors to carry malpractice insurance policies whose premiums may exceed $100, 000 a year — as well as forcing doctors to run numerous medical tests not because they think the patient needs it or has asked for it, but simply to practice what is known as “defensive medicine”.

If you think the economic effect of this tort system is small, ask yourself why the trial lawyer’s professional groups give millions in campaign contributions every election to Democrats sympathetic to the current tort rules.

Still yet another agency, the Federal Reserve, continuously inflates a fiat currency thereby guaranteeing an ongoing, constant decrease in the value of everyone’s dollars.

How, in the face of this onslaught, can you expect anything BUT rapidly rising costs?

And why on earth — in the face of all the evidence that these government interventions are economically disastrous and unsustainable — would anyone think we can put 40 million more people into the system at no additional cost?

How is more of the same poison going to make us well instead of killing us off?

Picking up spencer's comment:

OK, I'll buy that US life expectancy is higher than in France. But it still comes down to the point that we pay 50% to get essentially the same results.

You are defending the most wasteful and inefficient system in the world.

What the U.S. pays for its health care compared to other nations is pretty much right in line with the relationship that exists between health expenditures per capita and GDP per capita. France (for example) pays much less because that level of spending is consistent with their much lower level of GDP per capita.

Other nations, meanwhile, actively suppress the amount of their health care spending by limiting its availability (Canada, UK, etc.), which should not ever be mistaken for efficiency. Continually high capacity utilization rates for medical facilities in these countries are a confirmation of chronic underinvestment in critical resources.

Michael,

You are offering salt and protein to Spencer when he clearly wants sugar and meringue.

Obama good,
Free markets bad.

Spencer,

Again you show up not to do much more than throw darts, useless idiot shit.

Tell me sir, is the healthcare inefficient, or is it the government dictated payment and paperwork?

I have had three operations here in Houston in the last 20 years, all three were conducted in different hospitals by different surgeons, and all three were examples of efficiency and good results.

I am willing to bet my next months earnings that the dominant inefficiency or waste in our health care system is that which is introduced by government dictate.

But, then I am generally more willing to trust the guy I pay than the guy you vote for.

So this guy is saying is that Americans should live as long as the French but end up dying from car accidents and murders? In other words, Americans are greater risk-takers than the Frenchs which is what you'd expect when it is a more entrepreneurial nation than France.

Although I agree that the naive life-expectancy argument in favor of health care reform is fatally flawed, the precise claim of Ohsfeldt and Schneider appears to be a little misleading… http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/08/25/violence...

The Free Dictionary explains that the word “homicide” is broader in scope than the word “murder”:

“Murder is a form of criminal homicide; other forms of homicide might not constitute criminal acts. These homicides are regarded as justified or excusable. … The intent of the killer usually determines whether a criminal homicide is classified as murder or Manslaughter and at what degree.
…Modern statutes generally divide criminal homicide into two broad categories: murder and manslaughter. Murder is usually further divided into the first degree, which typically involves a premeditated intent to kill, and the second degree, which typically does not involve a premeditated intent to kill. Manslaughter typically involves an unintentional killing that resulted from a person's criminal negligence or reckless disregard for human life.”

And how about measures of delays in satisfying health care wants?

Americans drive more miles than Europeans. America is a big spread out country, and daily commutes, entertainment excursions, vacations, and visiting relatives entail much more driving than for Europeans. In addition, government-imposed driving costs in Europe are far higher than in the US, creating a significant disincentive to drive.

I haven't seen the data, but I would think Canadians would be similar in that regard to Americans. But Canadian health care is so much inferior to much of Europe, not to mention the US, that it is unlikely to be an important confounding factor.