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Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

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Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#51

Post by julienb_sea »

TuringNYC wrote: post #5

There really are two Americas - wealthy america and the rest of america. I'll bet if you split America into two sets of counties, the graph would be much different -- one would be a super-outlier and the other a super-laggard. I know this personally, as I've spent 21yrs of my life in one half, and another 20 in the other half. I've also lived overseas for several years, and they also have stratas, but much less prono…

For healthcare, you can probably segment America a little more generously into insured vs uninsured. If you are insured in America, your healthcare is reasonably good. Lower quality plans may have more restrictive networks or higher deductibles and maximums, but these are manageable and neither are truly barriers to care.

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#52

Post by Apocryphon »

free_rms wrote: post #38
JimTheMan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your employer picks a plan for you, which isn't what you need. You go to your doctor, who then tries to treat you. But then has to fight an insurance company who wants treatment that isn't in your best interests or isn't covered by the employer plan. You get home and discover your Doctor is out of network. Pay up. You spend a million years fighting the insurance company. OR your insurance is good, so the doctor says,…

Not to mention squads of clerks at every single doctor's office doing battle with entire armies at the insurers in a many-to-many clusterfuck of epic proportions over every single bit of care delivered.

Also America is the most litigious society in the world [0], making medical malpractice suits an ever-present threat in everyone's minds; but tort reform does not help taxpayers, and hurts patients [1].

[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/12/03/why-us-lit...

[1] https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/medical_malpracti...

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#54

Post by pembrook »

perardi wrote: post #46
pembrook wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, there’s countless cities with tons of well off upper middle class people in the middle of the country. Metro-Denver, Metro-Austin/Dallas/Huston, Metro-Atlanta, Metro-Nashville, Metro-Chicago, Metro-Detroit, Metro-Minneapolis, etc. etc. etc. I’d say it’s more city/suburban vs rural. This doesn’t account for the poor & homeless in all of America’s inner cities, but does a better job explaining. Maybe “Fortu…

I think you have to go even finer grained than that. Chicago, for example. My old stomping grounds. The inequality within that city is stark. Glaring. The South and West sides are a world apart from the North side.

I guess the easiest way to slice it would be knowledge labor vs. unskilled labor. Regardless of where you live.

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#55

Post by troupe »

JimTheMan wrote: post #31
narrator wrote: post #7

We spend double, as a percentage of GDP, what any other rich country spends on health care, so that's not it.

Your employer picks a plan for you, which isn't what you need. You go to your doctor, who then tries to treat you. But then has to fight an insurance company who wants treatment that isn't in your best interests or isn't covered by the employer plan. You get home and discover your Doctor is out of network. Pay up. You spend a million years fighting the insurance company. OR your insurance is good, so the doctor says,…

I recently had a surgery done and we weren't sure it was going to be covered by insurance. I wanted to make sure I knew how much of a liability I was taking on by moving ahead before knowing about insurance. I was told the insurance was going to be billed $150k, but if they didn't pay, they would only charge me $15k as the cash price. I was ok with that since the surgery was important and insurance did pay, but that type of pricing variation is why healthcare is so expensive in the US.

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#56

Post by plandis »

I am always curious how data are compared between countries which will pretty much always have different reporting standards. For example, how does one doctor in Germany attribute a death to smoking vs. a doctor in the US?

The reason why I bring this up is I know of at least one metric where the definitions being used are quite disparate: child mortality. The US is very inclusive in counting pre-mature births as infant mortality whereas a lot of other countries would conclude these were not viable births and thus are not counted in the statistic.

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#57

Post by vidanay »

perardi wrote: post #46
pembrook wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, there’s countless cities with tons of well off upper middle class people in the middle of the country. Metro-Denver, Metro-Austin/Dallas/Huston, Metro-Atlanta, Metro-Nashville, Metro-Chicago, Metro-Detroit, Metro-Minneapolis, etc. etc. etc. I’d say it’s more city/suburban vs rural. This doesn’t account for the poor & homeless in all of America’s inner cities, but does a better job explaining. Maybe “Fortu…

I think you have to go even finer grained than that. Chicago, for example. My old stomping grounds. The inequality within that city is stark. Glaring. The South and West sides are a world apart from the North side.

One side of the street is Little Italy, the other side is not someplace to hang out after dark.

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#58

Post by wang_li »

heavyset_go wrote: post #17
narrator wrote: post #7

We spend double, as a percentage of GDP, what any other rich country spends on health care, so that's not it.

Other first world nations spend half of what we do, and they have better outcomes and quality of care[1]. They are able to insure all of their citizens with it while the US doesn't. [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

Your source combines access and quality in order to put the US at the bottom. If you go further down the page you’ll see that the US is sometimes better and sometimes worse. (Apparently Canadian doctors have trouble delivering babies.) If you seek out other sources of information you’ll find that the US has the best survival rates for certain types of cancer. Supposedly the US also produces 50% of the new pharmaceuticals that reach the market.

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#59

Post by OJFord »

troupe wrote: post #47

Last time I looked closely at infant mortality in the US, it looked like the US was doing horribly. However, after talking with some doctors at a neonatal ICU I found out that in the US, we will often identify an unborn child that is in trouble and get it out of the mother in an attempt to save it. Since these types of cases are considered a birth, they count against the mortality rate whereas in some other countries…

That's interesting, but for 'life expectancy' my understanding is that it's the expectation for an X year old, where X is something like 12 or 20 that I can't remember - designed to eliminate such effects, and instead indicate the environmental impact.

Edit: apparently I'm wrong, Wikipedia states that 'life expectancy at birth (LEB) is the most commonly used measure'.

Re: Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?

#60

Post by Frost1x »

JimTheMan wrote: post #11

"It's a poor nation with rich people in it."

I suspect that trend will continue until the wealth inequality is so rampant that the taxes needed to secure and defend the wealth of the rich can't be extracted from the rest of us because we no longer obtain enough wealth for our taxes to matter. At that point, wealth will need to retreat to their next most stable country to bunker down.

At some point, people may identify many of these people and entities for what many of them really are: leeches of society--not value creators. Let's not confuse your entrepreneur innovating and improving life with profit maximizing corporatism.

We continue to play this experiment under a rhetoric that claims this is progress, all while we continue to play the song of failed promises of trickle down economics. To me, our current direction seems a lot more regressive than progressive, but who am I.

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