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#41
10-06-2007, 07:30 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
The willingness of people in the US to pay more to a middleman than purchase directly is bemusing. Why do US voters willingly spend so much for so little?
This is the top 30 countries in the world ranked by life expectancy with spending on health care plotted over it (year 2000). You're spending 3 times as much on average to come 27th. And you mostly seem happy about it. Huh?  From: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php 
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#42
10-06-2007, 08:25 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
[ QUOTE ]
The willingness of people in the US to pay more to a middleman than purchase directly is bemusing. Why do US voters willingly spend so much for so little? This is the top 30 countries in the world ranked by life expectancy with spending on health care plotted over it (year 2000). You're spending 3 times as much on average to come 27th. And you mostly seem happy about it. Huh? [/ QUOTE ] Freedom isn't free. Also, this guy has some answers.
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#43
10-06-2007, 08:51 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
[ QUOTE ]
The willingness of people in the US to pay more to a middleman than purchase directly is bemusing. Why do US voters willingly spend so much for so little? [/ QUOTE ] No options other than our current medical industry?
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#44
10-06-2007, 08:55 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] The willingness of people in the US to pay more to a middleman than purchase directly is bemusing. Why do US voters willingly spend so much for so little? [/ QUOTE ] No options other than our current heavily regulated medical industry? [/ QUOTE ]
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#45
10-06-2007, 09:47 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
[ QUOTE ]
Also, this guy has some answers. [/ QUOTE ] 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: [ QUOTE ] 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. [/ QUOTE ] 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? --- 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.)
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#46
10-06-2007, 09:48 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] The willingness of people in the US to pay more to a middleman than purchase directly is bemusing. Why do US voters willingly spend so much for so little? [/ QUOTE ] No options other than our current medical industry? [/ QUOTE ]If you mean because the politicians get elected with money from the HMOs and pharmaceutical industry and will be bought off or sacked if they try to prevent legalised theft...yeah, but it doesn't explain why US voters put up with it. Not to mention that education and social security make the biggest difference to life expectancy, but the poor and moderately well-off keep voting for cuts in services to provide tax cuts for the rich. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] Oh yeah - you don't actually have any choice. No, neither do we; just one of two tyrannies every few years. Our lot just haven't quite finished the job of selling us all to the corporations yet. [img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img] That article linked to makes only partial sense. Life expectancy is increasing everywhere - saying that US life expectancy is rising so all must be well is not convincing in a context where it's rising worldwide and the US ranking has dropped from 11th to 42nd in 20 years. The point on data collection methods is valid, and especially infant mortality. There are changing cultural issues here - stillbirth denies a birth certificate, proper burial and official acknowledgement that the child existed. Attitudes to this are changing, so the infant mortality figures are tough to interpret. Prostate cancer and breast cancer are due to over-screening picking up low grade tumours that will not become lethal before the individual dies of something else; it just subjects people to unnecessary toxic treatment and a devastating diagnosis to blight their remaining lives. And makes the screening companies, drug companies and doctors rich. The UK used to make the same mistake with dentists until it was discovered that they were drilling holes in kids teeth in order to make money for filling them. The main problem with the article is that it misses the point. It's not that the US is losing 6 years per capita on average - a lot of this is down to way healthier diets, better education and better welfare provision elsewhere. What makes no sense is that the US is willing to spend so much more than anywhere else for outcomes that are clearly not better than anywhere in the developed world. It's not a few dollars, it's 3x as much for something that is already expensive. How does anyone justify this? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]
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#48
10-06-2007, 10:11 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
I'll exclude arguments about freedom of choice here, since those are well explained on this forum.
I don't have any interest in defending the current health care industry in the U.S. since it is probably the most regulated industry in the country. I do have a few questions. Do these healthcare costs include non-life extending procedures. For example, if I choose to have corrective eye surgery and a nose job, it doesn't increase my life expectancy, but does increase my health care expenditures. Secondly, a lot of life expectancy has to do with lifestyle decisions. If people in the US choose to live less healthy lifestyles, that isn't an indictment of the health care industry, right? If we have a much higher number of by-pass surgeries in this country then it would increase costs but not necessarily increase life expectancy, just keep it from being lower. Heart disease, I think, is the #1 cause of death in this nation, or at least close to it.
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#49
10-06-2007, 10:12 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
[ QUOTE ]
Let's review this oft-trotted out column's answers, shall we? [/ QUOTE ] Very nice job. I filled in some stats that were also misrepresented in the article below....not that it matters much considering you completey refuted it, but just FYI on the numbers... [ QUOTE ] 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. [/ QUOTE ] List of countries by infant mortality rate [ QUOTE ] Fifth: "Homicides". To support this, he gives a statistic of 20,000 murders [/ QUOTE ] It hasn't been that high in more than 10 years. Since 2000, averages more like 15,000.
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#50
10-06-2007, 10:20 PM
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Re: Bush\'s 4th veto of his presidency is a good one
Good points. Thanks.
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