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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?

#201
post #194
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, the figure is 14% of your gross salary, and in France it’s over 20%.

It should be noted that in Germany if you are employed, half of those 14% is paid for by your employer, so you only pay 7% of your gross salary yourself. And there are no deductibles. I think the closest thing to a deductible is having to pay for ambulance (about 20 euro for the trip, probably free if you can't afford it) and for hospital stays (10 euro per day, up to a maximum of 280 per year).

> so you only pay 7% of your gross salary yourself.

Tax incidence doesn’t not depend on who writes the actual check to the government.

When you get your monthly paycheck, your employer had already withheld the income tax and sent it to the government treasury. Does that mean that you pay no income tax, and the employer kindly covers it for you? No, of course not.

When you buy a new phone, 19% VAT tax is paid. Who pays it? The retailer is responsible to send the money to government, does it mean that he pays full tax, and consumers pay no VAT? Of course not, VAT is reflected in price, and if there was no VAT, the prices would fall down. Suppose that government said that half of VAT is paid by buyer, and half by seller. Would that make any difference at all to anyone involved? No, the final price paid by the customer would be the same, the amount of revenue received by the seller after VAT would be the same, and the government would receive the exact same amount of money. Of course, the outcome would be exactly the same for any other government mandated “split” in who pays VAT.

Similarly, any split in who nominally pays healthcare tax does not in fact matter in the slightest with respect to who actually bears the burden of the tax. Government cannot mandate that half of the burden is on employer and half on employee, because it simply has no power to do so: tax incidence depends on relative elasticities of supply and demand, and not at all on what the government claims the incidence to be. In case of taxing labor, almost all of the incidence is on the seller, that is, on the worker. So, government might say that half of tax is paid by the employer, but the only result of it is that some people are tricked in actually believing that.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what someone's life expectancy would be without the personally-avoidable things such as smoking, obesity, overdoses, and suicides. Homicides, road accidents, and infant deaths are harder to control as an individual.

Personally avoidable, yes. Product of society, also.

Basically, I'm wondering: if someone makes good decisions, or the best of their circumstances, how does their average life expectancy stack up to other developed nations?

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long part of the sizeable majority of human history, the average lifespan varied from 25 years to 30 years tops.

The reason mortality rates were so high was primarily due to child mortality from disease, virus, or bacterial infection. Not because people just dropped dead after 30 years. Once people got outside of the age of 20+, the average lifespan drastically improved for the individual since they survived the most difficult portion of life in terms of survival.

Actually, one of the leading causes of death, apart from early child mortality was bacterial infection caused by bad dental hygiene. Not to mention a host of other diseases that waited for them such as cholera, Typhoid, TB, etc. People didn't magically live off till their 60s and 70s and 80s after becoming 20 years old. Your statement of average lifespan "improving" for individuals is simply nonsense.

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

#204
post #3

For those short on time: “smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.” Still a good article

I wonder what someone's life expectancy would be without the personally-avoidable things such as smoking, obesity, overdoses, and suicides. Homicides, road accidents, and infant deaths are harder to control as an individual.

There's a causal relationship between the things you're calling "personally-avoidable" and the class wealth gap. People are emotionally predictive; if they don't see an ideal prosperous future outcome, they settle for prosperity where they can get it because it beats a lifetime of suffering, even if the end result is additional suffering.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason mortality rates were so high was primarily due to child mortality from disease, virus, or bacterial infection. Not because people just dropped dead after 30 years. Once people got outside of the age of 20+, the average lifespan drastically improved for the individual since they survived the most difficult portion of life in terms of survival.

Actually, one of the leading causes of death, apart from early child mortality was bacterial infection caused by bad dental hygiene. Not to mention a host of other diseases that waited for them such as cholera, Typhoid, TB, etc. People didn't magically live off till their 60s and 70s and 80s after becoming 20 years old. Your statement of average lifespan "improving" for individuals is simply nonsense.

> Your statement of average lifespan "improving" for individuals is simply nonsense.

It’s factually correct. For example [0]:

Life expectancy increases with age as the individual survives the higher mortality rates associated with childhood. For instance, the table above listed the life expectancy at birth among 13th-century English nobles at 30. Having survived until the age of 21, a male member of the English aristocracy in this period could expect to live:

1200–1300: to age 64

1300–1400: to age 45 (because of the bubonic plague)

1400–1500: to age 69

1500–1550: to age 71

17th-century English life expectancy was only about 35 years, largely because infant and child mortality remained high. Life expectancy was under 25 years in the early Colony of Virginia, and in seventeenth-century New England, about 40 percent died before reaching adulthood.

During the Industrial Revolution, the life expectancy of children increased dramatically. The under-5 mortality rate in London decreased from 74.5% in 1730–1749 to 31.8% in 1810–1829.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over...

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