How ‘death panels’ can prolong life in U.S. (Actual Headline Originally From Bloomberg News)

The Korea Herald ^ | June 4, 2012 | Staff

[SteelToe]

Average life expectancy is one of two statistics commonly used to compare the health-care systems of different nations. (The other is infant mortality.)

One of the puzzles about the U.S. system is that we spend far and away the most money per capita for health care, but we rank 50th in average life expectancy ― after Macau, Malta, and Turks and Caicos, among others.

We are all familiar with statistics about how much of health-care spending takes place in the last year of life, and with stories about old people who are tortured with costly treatments they don’t want and which prolong dying but don’t extend life in any meaningful sense. (Michael Wolff’s confessionary tale about his mother in New York magazine is a vivid example.)

Certainly, ailing old people should be allowed to die in peace, if that’s what they want, and not be subject to excruciatingly painful surgeries and drugs that will do nothing for them. These are more the fault of lawyers than doctors. In our experience, doctors can be all too cool and rational in their thinking about the end of life. It’s fear of lawsuits (or, in a few cases, trolling for customers) that prevents doctors from behaving rationally when prescribing treatment for the old and terminally ill.

[SteelToe]

This is the original article from Bloomberg

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-03/how-death-panels-can-prolong-life.html

[The Antiyuppie]

“How ‘death panels’ can prolong life in U.S. (Actual Headline Originally From Bloomberg News)”

Yeah...but not yours.

[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

One of the puzzles about the U.S. system is that we spend far and away the most money per capita for health care, but we rank 50th in average life expectancy ― after Macau, Malta, and Turks and Caicos, among others.

Those countries generally don't have a hostile underclass killing each other for drugs, lots of people engaging in deviant sexual behavior (resulting in fatal diseases), and massive obesity among the indigent and lazy (a seeming contradiction... but check out who uses EBT cards at your local supermarket... they're always 700lbs+)...

[tbw2]

By failing to classify very premature infants as “live births” and letting them die as “stillbirths”, infant mortality drops and life expectancy increases because of the administrative decision to let early preemies die.
By classifying children with severe birth defects as stillbirths and letting them die, such as Trisomy 18 or severe birth defects, the child dies without being counted in infant mortality, so life expectancy increases.
In both cases,the refusal to consider them “alive” and give medical treatment kills them while improving the official “life expectancy” metric.