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Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

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Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#61

Post by carbocation »

Alex3917 wrote: post #58

In addition to health insurance being broken, it seems like most doctors are really terrible in the U.S. I read the other day that it takes on average seven years to correctly diagnose a medical condition. Some diseases, like celiacs, have an average time until diagnosis of 10 years. If you haven't already read How Doctors Think, it's truly horrifying. Unless you have something like strept throat, you're generally pr…

Someone with even a remote familiarity with the practice of medicine would not refer to Lyme disease, one of the great imitators, as 'trivial'. The rest of your post, though forceful, similarly suffers from having no idea what you are talking about.

Regarding the length of time from the onset of low-risk chronic diseases (unpleasant though they may be), you are right that this is a problem but dead wrong about the cause. The problem is overspecialization and undercoordination. An inherent idiocy in the practitioners would be an easy problem to remedy; the truth is much more pernicious.

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#62

Post by DrJokepu »

scott_s wrote: post #43
hs wrote: post #34

of the three countries that have highest (and surprisingly parallel) slope: japan, south kore, mexico ... it suggests that #visit correlates with LE ... and health coverage is unimportant but there are countries that have less #visit but more expensive (it suggests patients go to doctor not only for consultation) ... so #visit is an unreliable predictor so is cost to me it seems the most predictive is location (yes,…

The slope of the line is an artifact of the visualization choice.

I think the slope is the whole point of the graph and it is supposed represent efficiency although in a very unfortunate way. The angle of the slope is defined by arcsin((life_expectancy - healthcare_costs) / constant). It's a bit like subtracting apples from oranges.

If there's one thing I've learned at engineering school it's that mixing up units of measurement is not a good idea. If you subtract years from dollars the value you get will carry no meaning. And that's why this visualisation is completely meaningless. They should come up with a more clearly defined and sane approach.

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#63

Post by shughes »

I think we should show a chart of each country's health care costs relative to how much their lawyers make on health care related malpractice cases. Because in America, it's out of control, and probably the largest reason health care costs so much.

Honestly, a good first step in taming the health care and health insurance costs should be to cap how much lawyers make on malpractice cases.

Why do people rarely talk about tort reform? I apologize if you did, but I just did a quick browser search for "tort" and "lawyer" and got no results.

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#64

Post by ams6110 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #58

In addition to health insurance being broken, it seems like most doctors are really terrible in the U.S. I read the other day that it takes on average seven years to correctly diagnose a medical condition. Some diseases, like celiacs, have an average time until diagnosis of 10 years. If you haven't already read How Doctors Think, it's truly horrifying. Unless you have something like strept throat, you're generally pr…

I'm sorry to hear of your health problems, but unfortunately doctors don't have tricorders yet. It's quite incorrect to suggest that people with "zero intellectual curiosity" are sought out by medical schools, in fact it's a preposterous claim.

We have made great advances in medicine in the past 100 years, but complete understanding of the human organism and its diseases still lies far in the future. Some diseases have no "tests" or definitive diagnostics; they are identified by ruling out other possible causes of the symptoms. This can take time.

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#65

Post by scott_s »

jstevens85 wrote: post #53
scott_s wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. As I suspected, I can immediately read the scatter plot. And the correlation that I wondered about is indeed there.

The problem with the scatter plot is that you lose the average cost/average life expectancy info. On the original plot, the UK corresponds roughly to average health care costs and average LE. The slope shows if the country is getting value for money. The upward slope of New Zealand shows that they are spending less money per person than the average yet getting better than average results. The downward slope of Denmar…

But it could easily be added in by having horizontal and vertical lines added that read "average healthcare cost" and "average life expectancy."

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#66

Post by Alex3917 »

carbocation wrote: post #61
Alex3917 wrote: post #58

In addition to health insurance being broken, it seems like most doctors are really terrible in the U.S. I read the other day that it takes on average seven years to correctly diagnose a medical condition. Some diseases, like celiacs, have an average time until diagnosis of 10 years. If you haven't already read How Doctors Think, it's truly horrifying. Unless you have something like strept throat, you're generally pr…

Someone with even a remote familiarity with the practice of medicine would not refer to Lyme disease, one of the great imitators, as 'trivial'. The rest of your post, though forceful, similarly suffers from having no idea what you are talking about. Regarding the length of time from the onset of low-risk chronic diseases (unpleasant though they may be), you are right that this is a problem but dead wrong about the ca…

"Someone with even a remote familiarity with the practice of medicine would not refer to Lyme disease, one of the great imitators, as 'trivial'."

The fact that it is an imitator makes it easier to diagnose, because a competent doctor will test you for it whenever you have unexplained symptoms. While it's true that the blood tests aren't very accurate, most of the problem is that doctors just don't get people tested in the first place. And even for chronic lyme that is undetectable because it supposedly forms cysts within the cells, there is a new test up to 50x more accurate than the standard test being developed that you can have access to if you're willing to be part of the trial group.

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#67

Post by nzmsv »

Alex3917 wrote: post #58

In addition to health insurance being broken, it seems like most doctors are really terrible in the U.S. I read the other day that it takes on average seven years to correctly diagnose a medical condition. Some diseases, like celiacs, have an average time until diagnosis of 10 years. If you haven't already read How Doctors Think, it's truly horrifying. Unless you have something like strept throat, you're generally pr…

> Someone really needs to make a crowdsourced website where you can post all your symptoms and test results, and then offer up a bounty to anyone who can figure out the correct diagnosis.

Just like that episode of House :) Except in the show most responses were things like "alien abduction" or "this thing my homoeopathic treatment cures". Oh yeah, and there were quite a number of these. How would you solve the swarm of crackpots problem?

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#68

Post by Alex3917 »

ams6110 wrote: post #64
Alex3917 wrote: post #58

In addition to health insurance being broken, it seems like most doctors are really terrible in the U.S. I read the other day that it takes on average seven years to correctly diagnose a medical condition. Some diseases, like celiacs, have an average time until diagnosis of 10 years. If you haven't already read How Doctors Think, it's truly horrifying. Unless you have something like strept throat, you're generally pr…

I'm sorry to hear of your health problems, but unfortunately doctors don't have tricorders yet. It's quite incorrect to suggest that people with "zero intellectual curiosity" are sought out by medical schools, in fact it's a preposterous claim. We have made great advances in medicine in the past 100 years, but complete understanding of the human organism and its diseases still lies far in the future. Some diseases ha…

"It's quite incorrect to suggest that people with "zero intellectual curiosity" are sought out by medical schools, in fact it's a preposterous claim."

Medical schools are famous for only admitting people who A) went to college B) had high GPAs C) are 'well rounded', meaning they participated in lots of school clubs or whatever. This seems like more or less a recipe for selecting candidates with low intellectual curiosity. And as for empirical evidence, I believe it's also the book How Doctors Think book that quotes the statistic that the vast majority of doctors couldn't name a single finding published in their field's leading journal within the last year.

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#69

Post by codexon »

Why is hacker news linking to blogspam instead of the original National Geographic website?

The blog is copying Clusterflock which copied kottke which credited biancolo who presumably saw it directly from National Geographic.

http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.h...

Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy

#70

Post by 3pt14159 »

onoj wrote: post #54
scott_s wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have data on the number of people who die because the FDA has not approved a drug that may save their life? Note that this is different from people who die because they can't afford treatment. I would be more comfortable with point 4 if we once again banned prescription drug advertisements.

Remember that the FDA in the US only requires that a drug be better than placebo to be "effective" in many cases the drug company just has to show 0.1% better than placebo to get passed.

They need to prove statistical significance. Getting a 0.1% better drug past would require a pretty large control and sample group, making the drug more expensive to continue to test. Also, the doctors are given the drug's effectiveness vs placebo, and no doctor is going to give a drug that give the patient a 50.05% rate of recovery when 50% is the base.
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