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Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

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Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#61

Post by trainerxr50 »

pm90 wrote: post #7

I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? What else is responsible for the almost 4yr difference with e.g. France? Is it diet? Is the air/water worse in the US?

American baby boomers hobby in retirement is going out to eat as much as possible and drinking beer/wine. Or they travel to other countries to go out to eat as much as possible and drink beer/wine/cocktails.

All the baby boomer men in my family would be dead if it wasn't for the American health care system.

Even suffering heart attacks, they didn't miss a beat to get back to going out to eat, drinking beer/wine and being massively overweight.

If you go to any restaurant at night it will be packed with fat old people stuffing their face. Most on medications so that they don't have to change their lifestyle.

No country has ever had the BMI of old people that America has right now. It is a wealth curse.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#62

Post by greybox »

sokoloff wrote: post #46
greybox wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has got to be a massive factor. What shocked me about the US when I went, was how much peptobismol people chugged down. There was not one meal in my 1 week stay there that I could digest without issue.

Annual sales of Pepto Bismol look to be well under $0.50 per person, so while the American diet and food quality is appallingly worse than Europe, I suspect your one week of stomach upset is not be a great source from which to extrapolate.

Fair enough, maybe it was just the amount and variety of peptobismol products that I noticed were for sale everywhere. For example just in the Hotel where I was staying, they had a bunch chewable peptobismol gummy bears + the ordinary bottles for sale.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#63

Post by throwaway290 »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #58
pm90 wrote: post #7

I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? What else is responsible for the almost 4yr difference with e.g. France? Is it diet? Is the air/water worse in the US?

I doubt you can free healthcare your way out of obesity. You can't even healthcare your way out of obesity when you make it really, really personally expensive to be obese. And obesity is almost certainly the mortality bottleneck these days. Obesity is primarily caused by the 1-2000 micro-decisions we make each year about what to eat, when, and how much. A free visit to the doctor now and then is just not going to mo…

I think free healthcare means government must want ppl to be healthy. Unhealthy people literally take money from government's pocket, so gov uses various regulation against unhealthy stuff and does healthy lifestyle promotion

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#64

Post by motorest »

davedx wrote: post #3

Spot the "democratic socialist" countries.

Courtesy of AI:

> Social democracy and democratic socialism are related but distinct political ideologies. Social democracy, often associated with the Nordic model, focuses on regulating capitalism to create a strong welfare state and reduce inequality through social programs, while generally supporting a mixed economy with private ownership. Democratic socialism, on the other hand, envisions a more fundamental transformation of the economic system, often including greater public or worker ownership and economic democracy, while also emphasizing democratic principles.

All countries in West Europe implement social democracies. They greatly outperform the US.

Countries in Eastern Europe are still enduring their legacy of communism/democratic socialism, but 30 years ago they experienced a radical swing towards the blend of neoliberalismo professed by the US.

Lastly, you look at data showing how the US greatly underperforms in key quality of life metrics, and the conclusion you opt to extract is cherry-pick those to look down on? That's tragic.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#65

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

throwaway290 wrote: post #63
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you can free healthcare your way out of obesity. You can't even healthcare your way out of obesity when you make it really, really personally expensive to be obese. And obesity is almost certainly the mortality bottleneck these days. Obesity is primarily caused by the 1-2000 micro-decisions we make each year about what to eat, when, and how much. A free visit to the doctor now and then is just not going to mo…

I think free healthcare means government must want ppl to be healthy. Unhealthy people literally take money from government's pocket, so gov uses various regulation against unhealthy stuff and does healthy lifestyle promotion

I don't see why that would work better than having the unhealthy people literally take the money out of their own pocket.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#66

Post by arp242 »

andrepd wrote: post #38
lrvick wrote: post #24

Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture so I am only surprised the spread is not worse. This has very little to do with location or genetics and everything to do with education and culture.

> Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture Every one of those points is also true in Europe (apart from possibly healthcare), unfortunately. Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere, places like the Netherlands are an outlier. Fast…

> Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere

It's the degree of things. I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US. I don't even have a driver's license. It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#67

Post by throw0101c »

arp242 wrote: post #66
andrepd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture Every one of those points is also true in Europe (apart from possibly healthcare), unfortunately. Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere, places like the Netherlands are an outlier. Fast…

> Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere It's the degree of things. I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US. I don't even have a driver's license. It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.

> I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US.

Whatever villages that used to exist in the US have been drowned out by car-centric suburbs that were build around them. The 'village' is now the downtown-ish area of the community that tourists go see.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#69

Post by diggan »

astura wrote: post #35
diggan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? Sometimes my wife convince me to try American candy/foods that we buy in these "foreign foods stores" locally, because she grew up eating some of them in her country. And every time we check the contents by reading the nutrition-labels or checking with apps like Yuka, it turns out that the stuff Americans put in the…

... Such as?

Last time I checked, these were some of the substances I found in American food/drinks/candy that are outlawed in EU:

- Titanium dioxide (E171)

- Potassium bromate

- Azodicarbonamide

- Propylparaben

I'm sure there is more, and there is probably also stuff that is banned in the US but not in Europe.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#70

Post by GlibMonkeyDeath »

This effect has been well studied, adjusting for wealth and ethnicity (e.g. black and white American vs. European, adjusting for poverty level here https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104684118), or just 1-5% highest income Americans vs. European (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7770612/.)

In 1990, there was no difference in life expectancy between wealthy white Americans and comparably wealthy Europeans (Fig 3 in the first link) Since then a gap has opened up among all levels of income (even the wealthiest white Americans now have lower life expectancy than comparably wealthy Europeans.) The second link looks at the biggest death causes (heart disease and cancer being #1 and #2) and conclude Americans have worse outcomes for both of these conditions.

Basically, Europe continued to improve while America stagnated in life expectancy over this time.

Interestingly, even in 1990, comparably poor Europeans had longer life expectancy than white Americans. So this isn't exactly new, but it seems all of American life expectancy has been stagnating, and wealth can only mitigate this to a certain degree.

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