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Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
71–80 of 125 posts
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you explain how you disagree. You mean people have as much money as the government to waste on their health issues? Or you mean people without free healthcare can self regulate habits and be totally not influenced by corporate advertisement and cheap unhealthy stuff dominating food markets? I think that's maybe too rosy
Imagine the government pays for healthcare. The government can pass laws. What is cheaper for gov, to pass laws or to pay for healthcare. Of course they prefer to pass laws which regulate unhealthy stuff and run promotions to get people be healthy. Regular people cannot do this.
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#73I 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?
Food, I believe it's obvious. France obesity rate is also lower than the US. Large portion of americans eat like they have free healthcare.
There's more. Traffic accidents, Americans have more than twice as many fatal accidents as Europeans and 3-4 times as many as France/Finland/…, and the age of people dying in traffic pulls down the overall average. And of course crime. Americans shoot each other, and that's not just 95-year-olds, so that'll pull down the average as well.
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#74Earlier 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…
Never been to US but saying car centric development in Europe is similar to US sounds crazy to me. It's not just Netherlands. Vienna, Budapest, Stockholm, Barcelona, Germany and Switzerland... is it really true people in America take buses and trains as often as in those places? and they are also so well maintained? is it just propaganda that public transport in US sucks outside of maybe NYC
It is absolutely not propaganda.
I live in a rural village about 5 hours' drive from NYC. There is no public transport here.
If I drive 45 minutes to the nearest city, I can catch a train—but that train will only take me to a few destinations (primarily Albany, NYC, or Boston one way, or Buffalo, Chicago and points west the other way).
Some cities (outside of major metropolitan areas, which do generally have some kind of rail system) have intracity buses, but they tend to be underfunded and dirty.
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are all universal across the EU and yet there's big differences between EU countries.
Food regulations doesn't mean people have a healthy diet. A lot of the Eastern Europe countries have higher obesity rates: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
That is likely more due to epigenetic factors than individual diets.
A lot of Eastern Europe was doing very poorly a generation or two ago, and we know that living through a period of hunger will cause your children to be more likely to gain weight.
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens. The true issue is secondhand smoke . That for me is what it all is about: preventing unwilling people from being exposed to smoke, full stop. About as many people die from smoking than from secondhand smoke. Think for a minute how horrifying that is.
> Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens. This is often mentioned, but it's simply not true. It's not old age itself that costs money, it's the part of your life where you need care and support. This is old age in otherwise healthy people, but smokers don't just drop dead one day, they go through as many if not more years of c…
I don’t think your link is showing what you want it to show - it’s showing costs, but not necessarily any sort of counterfactual delta AFAICT.
There’s been a number of studies on this, and they do seem to suggest that overall smoking saves society money. E.g. here’s one from Finland
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#77Earlier 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.
> It's rarely an issue and can go about my life by foot. bike, and public transport.
You are a very unusual person then, as the vast vast majority of people in not urban core Ireland have (and use) a car. I live in a Dublin suburb, and we're one of the few married couples that don't have two cars.
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Food, I believe it's obvious. France obesity rate is also lower than the US. Large portion of americans eat like they have free healthcare.
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.
Eating food and drinking water in a strange place can upset your stomach even if the people who live there all the time are fine. This is a very well-known phenomenon.
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#79What typical Reddit ignorance that compares the avg life expectancy of the whole USA with a range of 68 years for tribal people to 85 years for “Asians”, a 17 year spread, to individual European countries. It has always baffled me a bit that Europeans keep making this basic type error, by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA that suf…
Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA Isn't USA a country? How is a country-by-country comparison "typical Reddit ignorance"? I'm gonna use my typical Reddit ignorance to guess you are indeed from the USA.
Because each state in the US has it's own flavor of regulation (and culture) impacting most of the factors that affect life expectancy most greatly. Your access to booze, cigs and healthcare is very different in NM than it is in MA.
It's also a very US-centric thing to think that the US is the only country with significant differences between its internal subdivisions.