and
Oops, my bad. You paired diabetes with obesity, so I had tunnel vision and considered only type 2.
Not necessarily, but giving people everything they want for free is a terrible disincentive towards taking care of themselves.
People that have no recourse but to steal from others to benefit the irresponsible disgust me even more.
If the USA were absurdly unhealthy, wouldn’t life expectancy be decades lower than in, say, Denmark or Sweden? As it is, life expectancy is a mere two years lower.
What this suggests is… quality of health care has very little to do with how long most people live. As long as kids get vaccinated against the worst diseases, and as long as there’s sufficient food, MOST people around the world will live 75-80 years, whether they have access to good doctors or not.
You guys know Americans are now dying younger now i.e. life expectancy is shortening.
This is ridiculous. Most obesity is the consequence of an utterly shit diet and poor exercise regime- an awful lot of that is due to hidden sugar in food and drink.
Most people don’t die until they are in their 70s and 80s. I think something like 75-90% of children born will live to see their 65th birthday. In the US, you qualify for medicare after age 65, so there is also that to consider. Also as I posted earlier, life expectancy at 65 isn’t really bad in the US, it is fairly average for a wealthy nation. Our lower life expectancy is probably due to people dying younger (from accidents, violence, lack of health care, etc).
Even if you have spotty, shitty health insurance most of your adult life I don’t think it’ll do too much damage to survival rates. Quality of life will be lower, but generally people don’t die of natural causes before age 60. Generally, there are obviously exceptions.
FWIW one statistics I’ve heard is that people in wealthy countries gained 30 years of life expectancy in the 20th century. 5 years from medicine (physicians, hospitals, surgeries, medications, etc) and 25 years from public health advances (vaccines, clean water, sanitation, anti-pollution efforts, worker safety rules, etc).
In poor countries once they have working public health, life expectancy at birth generally shoots up to 75 or so. Vietnam and Thailand have a life expectancy at birth of about 75, vs 78 in the US, and around 80-82 for most of Europe.
USA doesn’t even have a decent infant mortality rate - with one fifth of the economy dedicated to healthcare. : https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_05.pdf
One reason the USA has 1/5 of the economy dedicated to health care is because the health/industrial complex is free to charge whatever they want for their profit-bloated services. Recently I needed a urinalysis. I assumed my doctor would put a ten-cent reagent stick in my pee and look at the color. “We don’t do that anymore.” I was sent to the lab for a $60 urinalysis, which showed exactly the same thing (elevated protein) that would have been clearly and unambiguously revealed by the reagent stick.
Last week I had a tooth extracted by a Philippine dentist, who charged me $14, including anesthetic. What’s the going rate nowadays for a tooth extraction in the USA?
If I recall, when I had a wisdom tooth extracted (local anesthetic, very uncomplicated) it was about ten times that.
Nothing to add to the discussion, but damn, in the life expectancy map that’s a big knock in 1918. I’ve read how bad the Spanish Flu pandemic was but that drives the point home.
Questions like the OP are hard partly because it is difficult to decide what the metrics should be and who the fair comparisons to should be.
Compared to other wealthy nations we are clearly not the pick of the healthy population litter. But the difference between the wealthy nations as a whole are small compared to how they differ from “the rest”.
We’ve made tremendous improvements in infant mortality but are still just catching up to our peer group’s and maternal mortality rates actually have gone in the other direction.
Life expectancy at at 60 is 23 years - 3 years behind homogenous and very long lived Japan and in the pack with the likes of excellent healthcare and relatively less diverse than the U.S. Switzerland, Finland, Germany, and the U.K. (all 24 years).
Still there have been efforts to create reasonable report cards. Here’s the Commonwealth Fund’s effort:
Another set of international comparisons -
Interpret how you choose. My take is that we are not awful but that much tracks with the inequalities of our system, significantly larger disparities than most of our peers with major health outcome impacts.
How a responsible person can put a positive spin on the catastrophe that is US healthcare is beyond me.
The **World Health Organisation ** said in Feb this year:
Put another way: Life expectancy in the USA is declining:
Again, this in a country that spends twice as much as most developed countries on healthcare and doesn’t even cover the whole population.
This is unquestionably a national catastrophe.
“Catastrophe” is IMHO more than a bit hyperbolic. Not quite as good as our peers even though we spend much more is more on target. Observing that some of that relatively weaker performance is likely due to structural items that our health care inequities are only one symptomatic part of is hardly a positive spin. It is to me more of an acknowledgement of the scope of the challenge.
Not at all, the USA has national healthcare emergency The fact corporate media chooses not to report that doesn’t diminish the tragedy. CNN
Life expectancy - uniquely in the developed world - is declining in the USA..
Decline in U.S. life expectancy deserves more local and national attention
We’ve had threads on these life expectancy numbers before so I’ll keep the response brief. The actual data from the CDC for your interest.
As your link notes, there has been a long term streak of rise in life expectancy at birth in the United States and it is indeed notable that the streak was broken in 2015 with a 0.1 year drop. Understanding why that drop, even if it is a blip and not a trend, has occurred is important but that understanding is not served by hysterical the sky is falling posturings.
That life expectancy drop of 0.1 year was pretty much the result an increase of deaths before 65, as overall there was no decrease in life expectancy at 65 or 75. Most analyses conclude that the opioid crisis and suicide are major contributors. International comparisons show that we are behind the U.K. and Canada for life expectancy at 65, for example, but by less than a year. So why are more Americans dying before age 65 and is it simply a healthcare system issue?
The article you link to in fact discusses the context of structural inequalities as a major factor, as I have been stating:
To believe that the problem is one of the healthcare system alone, or even primarily, is naive, and would suggest “solutions” that miss the actual root causes in favor of trying to treat a few of the symptoms.
I’ll also “keep it brief” and respond in kind. It’s not me who is being “naive”.
Americans are, on average, dying younger than Cubans. And that with almost 20% of a first world economy dedicated to keeping them alive, a figure almost twice the average for first world nations - and, uniquely among those nations, it doesn’t even cover the population.
It’s a crisis, it is a catastrophe, and it is a national emergency.
You keep saying that, but I really think that your own prejudices are getting the better of you. Gods know why you care, as you dislike American, dislike Americans and don’t live here in any case, but there you have it.
At any rate, here are the Cuban statistics.
Cuba, of course, is a country of 11 million people who are pretty homogenous. While we do have some states with lower populations, we have several states that alone have larger and more diverse populations, many of which have higher life expectancy averages than Cuba…some of which would rank in the top 5 in the world. So, it’s not a national catastrophe or emergency either…it’s a local one in most cases. Really, though, a lot of what brings us down isn’t healthcare per se, but things like diet and poor exercise habits and sedentary lifestyle. There is also a very large disparity between rich, poor and middle-class outcomes wrt life expectancy. The US is a study in contrasts, and it’s also a hostage to its own history in a lot of cases. Even where people live (suburbs, inner cities and the like) have roots in our history, in racism and racial segregation and in the outcomes. Our healthcare is a good example of this. It’s a mess and it’s a total gordian knot that has no simple answer because of history and politics. For the majority of Americans our healthcare, while expensive, does an adequate job. Sorry if that runs contrary to your expectations and prejudices but it does. If it didn’t, then in a country of over 360 million people we’d be a lot lower down…more like China or Russia than basically where we are at.
That said, we definitely need to fix this. The problem is, no matter how much you want to flail your arms and tell us how bad we are, how stupid we are, how we aren’t like you, the reality is there is no easy way to get there from here. There are plenty of people who think we should go to a single payer system, or universal health care or myriad other things that ‘everyone else’ (who is a rich, homogenous and/or a small population nation) has, but with our political system and the various corporate interests as well as the historical expectations of the majority of Americans it’s not something that anyone has been able to do. Hell, look at what the Republicans have tried to do. They are trying to change the system to be more in favor of their supposed corporate masters, they have all the reins of government today, and they STILL can’t even get their own people on board to accomplish even the changes they are trying. It was truly miraculous, to me at least, that Obama and the Dems were able to accomplish as much as they did…and, frankly, they were just putting eyeliner on the pig, not really fixing anything.
Really, the problem with the US system isn’t that it doesn’t work…if that were really the case, if it REALLY was a ‘a catastrophe’ and a ‘national emergency’ it WOULD be fixed. No, the problem is, it works just good enough that there just isn’t the sort of national uproar needed to make real, substantial changes. Until there is, it won’t really change. I wish you were right and it really was as bad as you think it is. But depending on who you are and your skin color and socio-economic strata, it’s not. Until it is we are probably stuck here sucking hind tit wrt the other rich nations.
Cuba has heavily prioritized national health and longevity. There is an abidance of well-trained doctors and well-equipped hospitals, and no economic impediment to health care access. Arguably, this has been accomplished at the expense of other lifestyle issues. You can’t have everything without some tradeoffs. Secondarily, Cuba (as I understand it) has high standards of nutrition, abundant healthful food, heavily organic, with little access to junk food.
Next time you visit your doctor inb the USA, ask him how many hours of medical school instruction were dedicated to general principles of nutrition. US doctors are probably no better informed about nutrition than the average Facebook newsfeed reader and no doctor I’ve ever consulted ever asked me ab out the details of my daily diet.
Dude, it’s a third world country. FFS.
A lot of third world countries are gaining on the USA in terms of public health, partly due to the fact that they are prioritizing affordable and effective health care, instead of playing to the profitability of the medical/industrial complex.
Don’t call me Dude, unless you want me to take it as condescending. And I hope FFS doesn’t mean what I’m guessing it does.
Wow. You’re not only prejudiced against Americans, you’re prejudiced against Cubans, and the third world in general as well.