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Also,
this guy has some answers.
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Let's review this oft-trotted out column's answers, shall we?
Point the first: "We've set records in this country every year." Nice, but irrelevant to our performance vs. the world. It's easy to set records when you start out that far behind.
Point the second: "The disrepancy is only six years!" Give me a break. One paragraph ago, he was proud of the records we've been setting by pushing that rate up .1 year at a time. As of 2000, six years on the life expectancy chart was the difference between us and Lebanon, China and Ecuador. Given that all but the worst howler monkeys running a government without an AIDS epidemic or a war involved can
keep that number at 65, what we really have here is something like a 50% disparity. This argument is such misleading nonsense that the author should be forced to take a statistics class, preferably at gunpoint.
Third: "Cuba is evil and I don't trust their data!" Again, give me a break; he's attacking a 200 country chart by fixating on one example. Is the entirety of Europe falsifying data out of a desire to make the US look bad, too?
Fourth: "We try to save more nearly hopeless babies and report the marginal cases." Okay, this is a good point and no doubt affects that rate...but not by six years and probably not even one year. There simply aren't that many specifically 22-26 week old preemies under a pound that die after being alive at birth. See #5 for a better idea of where this goes.
Fifth: "Homicides". To support this, he gives a statistic of 20,000 murders and 30,000 suicides (no data is given on how many more suicides we have than other countries, how many are due to guns, whether removing access to guns would lead those people to kill themselves anyway, or anything else related to why you would mention suicides here.) But let's give this a *massive* benefit of the doubt and assume that the US has 25,000 more deaths than Europe for gun violence (ie, non health care) reasons, which, on average, subtract 50 years from life expectancy for those people. Multiplying those numbers results in subtracting 1,250,000 years of life expectancy/year from a country with 300,000,000 people. In other words, giving him that *massive* benefit of the doubt accounts for four months. The difference between us and everyone else important, even taking Andorra out of it, is in the three year range.
Sixth: "The mortality rate for two specific types of cancer is lower here!" Wonderful. Is non-socialized medicine - rather than different treatment methods or a culture of frequent mammograms - responsible? We have no idea. Of course, this also begs the question: Doesn't this mean that, by every other metric, we're *worse* and simply being propped up by these two common cancers?
Seventh:
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One final note, here. Even if the article is right, and we on average have six fewer years to live due to our excessive freedom to indulge, so the hell what?
If you want to eschew smoking and fast food, exercise, and otherwise lead the disciplined life that will allow you that extra six years of geriatry, so that you may live as long as the average Andorran, that's your prerogative. Some of the rest of us may choose to live it up a little, even if that means we spend six fewer months in the nursing home before kicking off. Of course, you could also get struck and killed by the organic food truck in the parking lot of Whole Foods.
The problem with the public health crowd is that life expectancy, and preventing X number of deaths each year, is really all they value. The freedom to take risks, the freedom to enjoy even the indulgent parts of life, any notion of individual liberty--there are no columns for these things in their spreadsheets. They want government nudging people toward better choices (and by "better" they mean, "choices that will add more days to the end of your life"), even if some of us already understand the risks, and have simply come to the conclusion that 1,000 days of tasting chocolate cake is better than an extra year in a life without cake, or in a life with very little of it.
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Brought a tear to my eye, this strawman did. "Public health care is a threat to our liberty to take risks!" What the hell is he talking about?
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Oh yeah, and we pay 3x more for what we've got now than anyone else in the world, while leaving more people without insurance than anyone else, as well. But socialized medicine? That, sir, is an assault on our freedom (to overspend for bad results, apparently.)