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The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

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Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#211

Post by marcus_holmes »

grecy wrote: post #158
poulsbohemian wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"1 in 25 Americans being born will not make it to their 40th birthday." >(The cardio health one doesn't seem as strong). Here's a bit of an anecdote, but I bet my family isn't alone in this type of story... my cousin died from cardiac arrest at age 45. Keeping the story here brief - he was a high-income business owner who got into a tough spot in his marriage and business, found himself without health insurance when…

It doesn't even have to involve death. My buddy separated his shoulder snowboarding when he was 22, but had no health insurance because he was working at the ski resort for something like $6/hr (US Ski Resorts are legally allowed to pay below minimum wage... go figure). So he never went to the Doctor, because he couldn't afford it. He's 41 now, and that shoulder impacts almost every day of his life.

I never understand why you guys put up with this. The French are burning Paris to the ground because their retirement age got put up 2 years. But America puts up with the most outrageous hardship with barely a whimper.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#212

Post by hparadiz »

ceejayoz wrote: post #191
hparadiz wrote: post #87

America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. A person in South Carolina will have a different life from someone in say Santa Barbara, California.

> America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. Chart us against the entire OECD, then. The results are stark . https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low

All I'm saying is pooling the entire United States into a single data point is fairly useless. We need to know which demographics are the ones bringing down the average the most in order to make moves that will improve this metric the most.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#213

Post by sgc »

pedrosorio wrote: post #175
sgc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you can see in his chart at [1] from the same thread, drugs, violence, and accidents only explain less than 1/3 of the difference, so the rest would be mainly various disease/lifestyle and care related issues (the overwhelmingly top causes of death in the US [2]). I think those graphs are a easy to misread, the long tail of somewhat poorer results is less dramatic than that younger gap, but actually includes much…

> In [1], you can see that the last cause, cardiovascular, explains more of the difference than drugs, violence, and accidents combined. This is for overall life expectancy, not 5 to 40 death rates though. I would expect cardio-metabolic disease is a significant driver of "early" deaths (say before 65) in those over 40 in the US compared to other developed countries.

The point is, despite the twitter/article author's (perhaps sensationalist) claims, the numbers don't support the extreme emphasis on the 5-40 age group. The difference in life expectancy, which is what we are talking about, mainly (~2/3) comes from health and healthcare issues, and is in fact spread out throughout Americans' lives, from about 0-79 years of age.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#214

Post by sgc »

whakim wrote: post #199
sgc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you can see in his chart at [1] from the same thread, drugs, violence, and accidents only explain less than 1/3 of the difference, so the rest would be mainly various disease/lifestyle and care related issues (the overwhelmingly top causes of death in the US [2]). I think those graphs are a easy to misread, the long tail of somewhat poorer results is less dramatic than that younger gap, but actually includes much…

That's a fair point; I was simply trying to paraphrase the FT article in pointing out the importance of "social factors" (including diet/obesity/etc. leading to cardiovascular disease) in explaining US life expectancy and picked the three examples they used. I hadn't seen the chart you linked. I still think drugs, guns, and accidents are worth specifically highlighting even if they aren't the single biggest driver of…

They are definitely important issues that I have been aware of for some time, just due to where I have lived over the years. However the author went a bit too far and lost sight of the forest for the trees.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#215

Post by magicalist »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #171
theGnuMe wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really tragic to hear. In your case doesn't the ACA limit your out of pocket max?

Only for marketplace plans. For plans purchased through employers the sky is the limit.

> For plans purchased through employers the sky is the limit

Almost everyone with insurance has a maximum out of pocket limit now. It's possible to have a grandfathered employer health plan, but they'd have to have been running it since 2010 without substantial changes since then, including in benefits or cost increases. There are very few employer health insurance plans that would have met that criteria, and even fewer who tried to.

They also have to directly inform you that you're on a grandfathered plan, so it should not be a mystery to those who somehow are.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#216

Post by IAmGraydon »

kzrdude wrote: post #60
suprjami wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised at all. If you compare individual US states to other countries, some parts of the US south have worse healthcare systems than third-world nations. The US is by far the worst health country in the OECD.

I don't think it's really about healthcare. It's about everything else in life, that makes people obese or driven into a life of drugs (meth, etc.). Healthcare doesn't really save you from that.

It's not so much about the quality of healthcare as it is the price.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#217

Post by LanceH »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #202
8ytecoder wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a negative spiral. More people get bigger cars now because well there are more bigger cars on the road now. That and the convenience of an SUV is unbeatable for people with families - like baby seats or ease of getting in and out and so on. When I bought my car almost a decade ago, it felt reasonably sized. Now it looks puny on the road.

True. But language is important. We don't have to help them victim blame.

No victim blaming. Smaller cars are more dangerous given an accident is already occurring between multiple cars.

Choosing a car to be in an accident, a bigger car is a solid choice. Of course, that skips over being in an accident at all. It also skips over any concern for others -- but so many people view that hypothetical accident as clearly the other person's fault, so may as well go with the big car.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#218

Post by sangnoir »

xiaodai wrote: post #208

The average American has one testicle and one boob. What if u take out the 15% black population? The health care for the black community is just horrendous.

If you had read the about halfway into the article, you'd have read that the author has controlled for race, and that black people in the US had an improvement in health outcomes. One group that was hit hard? Working class white people.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#219

Post by grecy »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #211
grecy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't even have to involve death. My buddy separated his shoulder snowboarding when he was 22, but had no health insurance because he was working at the ski resort for something like $6/hr (US Ski Resorts are legally allowed to pay below minimum wage... go figure). So he never went to the Doctor, because he couldn't afford it. He's 41 now, and that shoulder impacts almost every day of his life.

I never understand why you guys put up with this. The French are burning Paris to the ground because their retirement age got put up 2 years. But America puts up with the most outrageous hardship with barely a whimper.

> I never understand why you guys put up with this

Oh, I'm not American, and actually I was there as a 22 year old Australian and was horrified. The idea that people in a Developed country didn't have access to a doctor was shocking - I'd never seen that before, and simply didn't understand. I thought everyone could just go to the doctor when they needed to.

Re: The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

#220

Post by jamil7 »

legitster wrote: post #4

"1 in 25 Americans being born will not make it to their 40th birthday." Wow. Actually impressed with the analysis backing this up. If you read the entire thread, he actually covers nearly every correlating factor I could think of. And it's pretty clearly drugs, guns, suicide, and cars. (The cardio health one doesn't seem as strong). The one that is crazy to me is the uptick in driving fatalities. Cars are an order of…

> Cars are an order of magnitude safer than they used to be and we were trending towards 0.

This isn’t true for the US, cars are actually more dangerous due to the prevalence of SUVs that skirt safety regulations by being sold as light trucks.

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