7 thoughts on “Low US Life Expectancy”

  1. One of the more interesting sets of statistics follows “life expectancy for a person of age X.”

    The normal media approach is to argue about the average life-expectancy of a child born today – which is the 77.9 figure. This isn’t at the pinnacle of the list.

    A hefty argument in the health care debate is “My, that’s lower than country Y! Why can’t we do that well?”

    But…

    If you take out the people who live fast and die young – for whatever reason – the numbers completely rearrange.

    IOW: We’re number one for life expectancy of eighty year olds. The cross-over is somewhere in the sixties IIRC. But it turns out that when you’re focused on people for whom the actual medical care is the determining factor, we’re on the top of the heap.

    So, yeah. We have more obese people. We have more heart attacks. But those are fundamentally lifestyle choices, not an indictment of the medical establishment.

    Unless, of course, you think we should all have resident nurses providing our meals as a moral obligation of our society.

  3. Excuses aside, this is still five years less than Japan.

    Does old age select for people who can afford good health insurance?

    Is dying really a lifestyle choice?

  4. I read the 48-page report linked to in the blog posting last night. It seems to me that the study argues that cancer treatment is a valid proxy for all of health care, and because we do that good, our health care system is not to blame for lower life expectancies. I’m not sure I agree with that.

    Be that as it may, we still spend twice as much as everybody else.

  5. Pete, you really need to take a course in statistics, or at least start reading a bit about how they are used.

    If you are a white male (better still, a white female) in the US, your lifespan is likely to be at or higher than that of a Japanese male on the whole. This isn’t an excuse, it is simply a fact of life that very few people have found ‘polite’ to discuss. Factoring out non-health issues (deaths by violence or accident, both of which are far, far more common in the US than anywhere else…and yes, these are often lifestyle choices) says little about healthcare affordability or access, and everything about the ‘apples and oranges’ differences between the US and other developed nations.

  6. From the white paper abstract:
    We find that, by standards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screening for cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heart attacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levels of blood pressure or cholesterol. We consider in greater depth mortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, diseases for which effective methods of identification and treatment have been developed and where behavioral factors do not play a dominant role.

    Just reading the abstract, and one gets the idea that the study looked at heart related causes of death. It also appears that mortality is higher for prostate and breast cancer. Going into the article, and there’s a long discussion on hypertension and cardio vascular disease. I must admit, I didn’t spend a long time reading the whole article, because I’ve already looked at age-adjusted mortality rates for various illnesses in the US as compared to the UK, Canada, and France.

    Our government still spends twice as much as everybody else. Perhaps we should cut government spending in half. We can start with the Congressional travel budget.

  7. Death is death, there is no going past that. Life expectancy is what it is.

    Likely this is not all about the US health care system, however the excessive costs thereof will be to the detriment of the economy, general standards of living, and, life expectancy. Consequences…

    Not that the US is doing particularly bad on average with regard to life expectancy – which is not to say that it could not and should not be doing a lot better.

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