Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

Post by igravious » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #91

forapurpose wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lingering effects of the great recession Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the problem. Also, the problem started in the last couple of years while the Great Recession began in 2008 (EDIT: and has since ended, with unemployment low for the last two years).

> Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S. The US recovery looks decent in top-line aggregate terms, but the distributional aspects are quite bad. (And that was true of the recovery from the previous recession, as well.) For broad social impacts, the distributional aspects are more significant than the top-line aggregates.

Post by bjourne » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 4:50 PM UTC

Post by specialist » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #55

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If nothing is done, the number of Americans with health insurance is expected to decline by millions this year (due to the repeal of the health care tax (I forget the term they used) in the new tax law). This is a bad metric. We should be worried about healthcare costs, not insurance coverage. You can have "universal coverage" and still be wrong, because people are paying $5000+/year in insurance premiums they can'…

> If it didn't cost a hundred thousand dollars to get sick then it wouldn't be a problem for people to not be insured against it. This is a dicey one. One of the things that drives treatment costs up is more advanced technology. Should we go back to 70s/80s-era cancer treatments, HIV treatments, surgical outcomes? We need a lot more national discussion about where the real opportunities to save money are, and what sh…

Post by specialist » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #71

majormajor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it didn't cost a hundred thousand dollars to get sick then it wouldn't be a problem for people to not be insured against it. This is a dicey one. One of the things that drives treatment costs up is more advanced technology. Should we go back to 70s/80s-era cancer treatments, HIV treatments, surgical outcomes? We need a lot more national discussion about where the real opportunities to save money are, and what sh…

The problem is that we keep trying to pretend that it both is and isn't a market. In theory you can actually have a free market for healthcare. You get cancer, there are multiple competing providers of cancer treatment products and you choose one based on effectiveness and price. A better treatment can charge more, but if it's only 5% better and costs a hundred times as much then most people won't use it. Which will…

Post by maroonblazer » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

devmunchies wrote: post #157

maroonblazer wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there's been some very recent findings that I missed, everything I've been reading for the last several years has found that fat and cholesterol are not the problems we once thought they were.

> everything I've been reading Sounds like you only prefer to read stuff that is pro-Keto. Saturated fat and cholesterol are the cause of many western diseases. Cholesterol-deniers are setting people up to get fatty streaks in their artieries. A low fat/cholesterol diet (especially plant based) is the only one that has been proven to reverse heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Many diets are good for losing weight, bu…