Apart from the utter brokenness of the US system, which needs no further proof I guess, this chart says that health care spending isn't very effective at increasing life expectancy. There are other factors, maybe food, that influence life expectancy much more than health care.
Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
81–90 of 107 posts
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#82This is a terrible graph. It took me five minutes to figure out how everything is related. Data such as this is much more naturally plotted as an x-y scatter-plot. Thickness of the datapoints could indicate number of doctor visits. Instead, the graph eliminates the x-axis, but retains the space. Very strange choice.
the graph gives an important ratio that's hard to capture in scatter plot age/cost (the slope) also, how do you identify your datapoints in scatter-plot neatly? to me this graph gives surprisingly rich information packed
in the scatter plot this information is more clear to me, also - in the scater plot if I draw minimal squares line, I can immediately see the countries that are "better thhan average" and "worse than average" with their efficiency of healthcare.
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#83Data for missing countries (from a comment written by the author of the original graph):
HEALTH CARE SPENDING (per person in U.S. dollars)
Norway: $4,763
Netherlands: 3,837
Belgium: 3,595
Germany: 3,588
Ireland: 3,424
Iceland: 3,319
-------------(OECD average: $2,986)
Greece: 2,727
Italy: 2,686
Turkey: 618
LIFE EXPECTANCY
Italy: 81.2
Iceland: 81.2
Norway: 80.6
Netherlands: 80.2
Germany: 79.8
Ireland: 79.7
Belgium: 79.5
Greece: 79.5
-------------(OECD average: 79.2)
Turkey: 72.1
DOCTOR VISITS A YEAR
Belgium: 7.6
Germany: 7.5
Iceland: 6.5
Netherlands: 5.7
Turkey: 5.6
Italy: no data
Norway: no data
Ireland: no data
Greece: no data
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#84Graphs are abused. Graphs are meant to present data clearly and concisely. The most clear and concise presentation method should be used. If it is not, there are reasons to be skeptical. This graph is not the best presentation imaginable; it's not even mediocre. It is meant to appeal visually to those who already have reached the conclusions it is meant to illicit; it is graph porn. Health care spending and quality i…
The research question is one that occurred to me. Do these cost data include spending on medical and pharmaceutical research? I would imagine that the bulk of that spending occurs in those same countries that are "above" the average line in this graph, and could contribute to that skewing.
Doubtful. Medical and pharmaeutical research is done either by private companies or by universities and such.
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#85Some reasons American medicine is very expensive: 1. Health insurance, but not treatment, is fully tax deductible. So if you buy your own penicillin, it's with after tax money, but if your insurance company buys it, it's pre-tax money. That's one of the reasons that health insurance is so widespred in America even for routine medicine like antibiotics and checkups. That's a major contributing factor in why the admini…
2. There's a shortage of doctors in America
To the contrary, the United States has an unusually high number of medical doctors per 100,000 persons in the population. Economist Martin Feldstein discovered a long time ago, in comparative studies of the United States and Britain, that doctors refer patients to other doctors, so that increasing the percentage of doctors in a country can actually result in more use of medical treatments per patient without any improvement in patient outcomes. After he made this discovery, the United States figured out that promoting the opening of more and more and more medical schools was not going to result in doctors serving underserved areas such as isolated rural areas. (Doctors like to live in communities similar to where their spouses are accustomed to live, as other studies have found.)
The other suggestions in the parent comment have been carefully considered by policy makers around the world and have been found to be policies with some ill trade-offs as well as good, and not just in the United States.
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding point 4, what would prevent a drug company from claiming that, say, Aspirin could cure AIDS? I do not think that is a stretch, either. If companies can profit from selling pills to increase penis length, I see no reason why they wouldn't make other claims if they were legal. I do not trust in the market to correct unverified claims; many people want to believe in miracle cures, and will buy snake oil despit…
They trust their doctors. In the rest of the world there are not the restrictions on drugs that are found in the USA. Also, what about all the people that could be saved by a medicine that have nothing to lose if it doesn't work since they have no other options -- right now they SOL. The amount of people that die because they cannot receive medicines that may work is staggering and a great injustice.
In the rest of the world there are not the restrictions on drugs that are found in the USA.
I have lived overseas long enough that I have been treated by licensed medical doctors in another country, who prescribed to me drugs that are not permitted in the United States. That was not a happy experience. I eventually had to have FDA-approved drugs that ACTUALLY WERE SAFE AND EFFICACIOUS sent over to me as I continued my stay in that country. There are prescribing and dispensing biases in other countries that frequently cause the most safe and effective medicines to not even be available in those countries at any price, even long after FDA approval of the best medicines in the United States.
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
the graph gives an important ratio that's hard to capture in scatter plot age/cost (the slope) also, how do you identify your datapoints in scatter-plot neatly? to me this graph gives surprisingly rich information packed
I don't understand your first point; the relationship between two variables is more clear to me from a scatter plot. And that's something else that bothers me about the graph: when I look at a graph with lines, I expect to see trends. But the lines in this graph are actually single data points. We're on the web, so it would be neat to be able to use the mouse to hover over data points to see labels.
Scatterplots are usually necessary to check correlations. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence
for a famous set of example scatterplots first designed by a statistician warning students of commonplace errors in interpreting correlation coefficients.
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#88Some reasons American medicine is very expensive: 1. Health insurance, but not treatment, is fully tax deductible. So if you buy your own penicillin, it's with after tax money, but if your insurance company buys it, it's pre-tax money. That's one of the reasons that health insurance is so widespred in America even for routine medicine like antibiotics and checkups. That's a major contributing factor in why the admini…
1. I doubt the effect of this is as strong as you seem to think, but ok.
2. There's a reluctance to allow doctors educated elsewhere to practice without undergoing a rigorous accreditation process of some sort in nearly every country in the world except possibly in some of the most destitute third world countries. This isn't unique to the US.
3. All over the world doctors have to train for at least 8 years or so before they can practice. Again, not unique to the US.
4. There's a reason for that. It means the worst quackery is kept off the market. I'd say that's a good thing (also, it's not unique to the US, although the FDA is indeed a world leader in its stringency). Note, however, that the entire world is using (and paying for!) drugs that have been through the rigorous FDA testing process, so again this is not a reason why medical care in the US is more expensive than in the rest of the world.
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't agree more and it's a point a lot of people are hush-huse about because it's easier to point the finger at the system than poor personal habits. just a small sample... http://grab.by/1v6n
Here's the thing, I'm a Canadian who's living in the USA. Canada has much lower health care costs - but our dietary patterns are much the same. In fact, I really have not changed my feeding habits at all since coming to the USA. Yes, unhealthy dietary choices weighs the system down - but it weighs all systems down, and to say it accounts for the majority of the discrepancy is IMHO missing the gorilla in the room, whi…
Canadian diet patterns are significantly different from those in the US. As of 2004, Canada had an obesity rate of 23.1%. The corresponding rate in the US (circa 2005) was 34%.
The big difference here is probably racial. Table 3 of my first link suggests white Canadians are only a little thinner than white Americans. But blacks, particularly black women, are considerably fatter than average. They make up about 12% of the US and 2% of Canada.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-620-m/2005001/article/adults...
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-620-m/2005001/article/adults...
Re: Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
#90A response to the graphic suggests that while "this was evidence of an insane and inefficient healthcare system", "if [they] really wanted a chart that captures what’s wrong with America’s healthcare system, [they] should have gone to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ national health expenditures data website and downloaded the figures showing how rampant third-party payment has resulted in consumers di…
The problem with the Health Care debate is that it's become so polarized that advocates of Single Payer won't admit its failures in other countries while those opposed to Single Payer won't admit we have a problem. Graphs like this are designed to create a visceral response but rationally they mean very little if not accompanied by an item by item breakdown of why the numbers are what they are. For example, the Canad…
Indeed, politics is the mind killer. - http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/