Comments on: Stupid Statistics: USA Actually Has Highest Life Expectancy

By: Goode Value Investing & Trading Blog » Lies They Told me About Healthcare

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:20:55 +0000

[...] (relative to other OECD countries) is proof that our health care system is flawed. I have blogged about this before. Life expectancy is driven by all sorts of things, and the US has higher violent death rates and [...]

By: Petrean

Petrean — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:28:54 +0000

Great website, adding your to my RSS !!

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:20:56 +0000

While I agree that if we have a more violent society that may create early death outside of our healthcare system’s ability to save a life it could skew our life expectancy figures. His assertion that the rate of low birth weight babies is not relevant to our healthcare picture is frankly dead wrong. The medical community repeatedly asserts that pre-natal care is essential to a healthy birth and avoiding low birth weight and premature births. To simply state and think we will all take at face value that this item can be dismissed on the assumption that teenage pregnancy is 1) unique to the U.S. and 2) the only meaningful cause of low birth weight is incorrect.

Another issue I have with his commentary is that larger companies that “self insure” really just use the insurance carrier to be the “bad guy” to deny claims is not accurate either. Large companies who self insure do have the ability to structure their employee’s plans more freely than smaller companies. However the options they choose from are given to them by the insurance company. The final arbiter of coverage or lack thereof is the insurance company as many of these types of plans have a stop limit of self insurance above which the insurance company will pick up the cost.

It seems we all agree that our current healthcare system is not ideal and there is need for change. “Raw data” may be misleading but cherry-picking statistics and inferring too much from too little is also quite misleading. However, it does open meaningul debate based on fact and that is certainly a step in the right direction.

By: Michael Goode

Michael Goode — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:00:36 +0000

DataGuru — Why shouldn’t they be subtracted from the data? If you are looking in terms of life expectancy, injuries and homicides reduce life expectancy while not being symptomatic of the quality of the health-care system. When using life expectancy data to compare health system efficacy across countries it would make sense to try to eliminate non-healthcare related causes of death.

Another way of comparing health systems is survival rates for different diseases, but the problem with these data is that differing diagnosis rates across countries will skew the data.

By: DataGuru

DataGuru — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:50:52 +0000

Coelho seems to have been cherry picking his statistics. Someone who dies of murder or an auto accident should not be subtracted from the data set entirely when determining if the health care system influences life expectancy. They never had the chance.

In the US, death by auto is the most common non-healthcare related death. Is it possible some of the road deaths can be attributed to traveling to Canada and Mexico for prescriptions healthcare?

By: John Hunter

John Hunter — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:57:27 +0000

One question is without dispute, by far the most costly system in the world is that in the USA. The question of what is health care, and how to measure it, then can cloud the debate over which performance numbers are best. It seems to me most analysis shows the USA system at best, in the middle of the pack for rich countries (while being by far the most expensive). It is hard to find any reason to think costs should not be reduced dramatically while coverage is increased to more of the population. And unless people think the USA is just less capable than all other rich countries – I would think we would believe that we shouldn’t be by far the most costly country for health care.

The USA certainly does some great work in health care. But it also does a very poor job at running a health care system instead running a sickness, accident and disease management system. Failing to do things like provide pre-natal visit to uninsured (other countries by and large don’t even have uninsured but…), stocking schools with sugar water vending machines, failing to encourage exercise… are signs of a failure to promote health.

Some of my posts on the topic
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2008/02/09/international-health-care-system-performance/
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2008/12/08/many-experts-say-health-care-system-inefficient-wasteful/
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2008/05/06/traveling-to-avoid-usa-health-care-costs/
http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2009/02/19/applying-disruptive-thinking-to-the-healthcare-crisis/
http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2008/01/08/measuring-the-health-of-nations/

The USA should be doing much better. It is a tragedy that in such an important area the USA is not performing much much better. One area the USA has done well with is reducing the prevalence of smoking and greatly increasing health in that way.