14 thoughts on “Health Care And Life Expectancy”

    1. So, it would seem, is a healthy economy.

      In the 30 years prior to Obama taking office, U.S. life expectancy increased by roughly five full years – a rate of about two additional months of life expectancy per year. Since 2010, though, further progress has been miniscule and actually reversed last year.

      I don’t regard it as any coincidence that 2010 was both the year Obamacare was enacted and also the year it became thoroughly evident to the general public that the lingering recession that had taken root about the same time Obama entered office, was, in all probability, going to become the new normal in America. And so it did.

        1. Yes, the recession started before Obama took office. But Obama is hardly the first president to arrive at the White House only to find a steaming pile of economic shite heaped on the front porch. What was different about Obama is that, while his policies were antithetical to preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States, they were Jim Dandy at preserving, protecting and defending the economic hard times of Great Depression 2.0 that is only now showing any real signs of lifting now that he’s, Allah be praised, gone.

          I brought up Obamacare mainly to mock the idiotic pretensions of many of its most fervent supporters that American life expectancy could be expected to tilt sharply upward post-passage. Obamacare did nothing positive for American life expectancy, but it wasn’t really responsible for any major part of the deceleration and decline we got under Obama either.

          That was mainly a product of the post-Ferguson, post-Di Blasio war on police and policing led by white progressives and black communists fronting for black and Latino organized crime – i.e., urban street gangs. Obama was in there bashing the police and ignoring the gang-led Holocaust flaring up in many major cities every step of the way.

          You have to understand that the composite life expectancy number for the U.S. as a whole is the weighted combination of life expectancy numbers for every sub-population, whether one does the slicing on the basis of socio-economics, race, national origin or whatever. Broadly speaking, the U.S. has a bi-modal life expectancy distribution. People who are black and Latino, urban and poor have dreadful life expectancies. Everyone else in the U.S. shares pretty much the same or a bit better a life expectancy as do citizens of famously long-lived places such as Japan and Northern Europe.

          Why this should be so is pretty obvious. Poor, urban blacks and Latinos kill one another like rabid dogs. The recent rash of upticks in “urb-rabies” cases have all occurred in cities with immemorial one-party Democratic political establishments which are – let us be blunt – completely in bed with black and Latino street gangs in the same way their predecessors were cheek-by-jowl with the erstwhile Mafia.

          Urban gangsters tend to be young. Only the very young are capable of being the requisite combination of vicious, aggressive and heedless of personal consequences required for ceaseless urban gang warfare. At some not terribly advanced age, even urban black and Latino men tumble to the idea that they might not be personally invulnerable. The streets of urban ghettos are No Country for Old Men, to borrow a well-known book and movie title.

          Life expectancy numbers are based, most importantly, on average ages at actual death for people of a given sort in the here and now. Every fifteen year-old gang-banger who ends on a coroner’s slab cancels out an entire year of extra living – relative to past norms – racked up by 50, 60 or more black and Latino senior citizens. A significant bulge in deaths of the young raises merry hell with the average life expectancy number for the combined racial, residential and socio-economic class to which they belonged in life.

          And thereby hangs the tale of recent dismal U.S. average life expectancy numbers.

  2. Single-payer has all the disadvantages of the current third-party-payer system without any of the (increasingly marginal, with every new layer of red tape allegedly aimed at “reform”) advantages.

  4. What’s going on with Megan McArdle? That snipe about guns was totally off-base but to be expected in socialist trash journalism – I just thought she was better than that. Blaming our possessions for our behaviour is so childishly typical of the left who refuse to see the cultural differences.

    1. Yeah, keeping the pre-existing conditions mandate, without the means for coverage providers to readily pass on the costs. 0-care is doomed to crash and burn. The “reform” being pushed threatens to crash and burn even faster as coverage providers raise premiums to cover an ever smaller and sicker customer base.

  6. But even here in the U.S., we don’t have a cost growth problem.

    This conflates how much people spend with how much services cost. People not being able to afford treatment doesn’t mean costs are under control. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the price of services are increasing either but I’d wager they are.

    Using her terms, we would want a system with high costs because that would mean people are purchasing services to keep them healthy and happy. We don’t want to lower the total amount of health care spending but rather lower the costs and prices for specific services.

    In a customer driven system, rather than a government controlled system, there will always be new services and treatments that cater to the problems of the entire market or to niches. From an individual’s perspective, new products and services that cater to them are a good thing but to the government, these new products and services are a bad thing because they drive up costs.

    This is why government run healthcare sucks and why those who have it rely on the USA for innovation.

    1. This is why government run healthcare sucks and why those who have it rely on the USA for innovation.

      Quite often the medical compounds “innovated” in the USA were actually discovered somewhere else and a US company basically took care of the mass production and FDA approval steps.

      2. You mean their new product had to come to a country that could produce and market it?

        If any of these products came from countries with socialized health care, why couldn’t they get their government to manufacture and prescribe the new treatments?

        More importantly, how would this situation change if the USA changed to the same type of system that inhibits the introduction of new treatments? Not only would it be bad for the USA but it would be bad for the rest of the world.

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