Posted on 09/09/2009 9:08:40 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
Forbes Magazine will feature a report by the Hudson Institute's Marie-Josee Kravis who points out the fallacy of tying a nation's average life expectancy to its level of effective healthcare. In her estimation, life expectancy does not translate necessarily to good or bad healthcare and the left's penchant for using it as a metric to denigrate America's healthcare system is illegitimate.
Kravis writes that, "life expectancy reflects not only health care but also diet and lifestyle. A raw match of life expectancy against health care spending is naive." She then goes on to discuss some of those mitigating factors. Things such as road fatalities, obesity, and drinking and smoking habits are different from country to country and thee factor materially affect life expectancy/ None of them are a result of the healthcare system, either. They are habits of the people, not failures of the healthcare system.
Karvis then offers one stat that might prove a model to get a better measure of healthcare: cancer survival rates. It seems that ours is better than other western nations.
Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...
I’m quite sure that if Obama’s plan passes life expectancies will go down.
And of course Democrats will blame Republicans, and the rich, for not spending enough.
The game goes on until either the people wake up or the country goes bankrupt - whichever happens first.
Infant mortality is another one. Every country measures them differently, so you cannot compare them. In Cuba I think a baby has to live 3 days before they would count its death in the infant mortality numbers.
Yes, infant mortality, accidents and violent deaths, drug use.
Let’s take the average life expectancy between men and women as an example:
Men have an average life expectancy lower than women because more male infants die than female (this is true in all cultures), more male teenagers die in accidents and through violence and by illegal drug use. At the same time, fewer females die due to pregnancy and childbirth than in previous eras. So the male AVERAGE will naturally go down in comparison to the female.
What if you want to make the male/female lifespans more equitable? Do you reduce young male violence, risky behavior and drug use or do you increase young female death? None of this has to do with health care.
Countries have these discrepancies too that have nothing to do with health care. They have more to do with immigration, violence and cultural issues.
Table 2-6 shows that infant death rates are far lower in the US than in Japan or Norway once birthweight is taken into account.
http://books.google.com/books?id=HmAtKsSvI7gC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=fetal+mortality+rates+by+birthweight+norway&source=bl&ots=ErbC0gp8xf&sig=HfrXbvq9zOZMxCReDJDpds6XPr4&hl=en&ei=sq2nSsAqj6W2B5DUjZ4I&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=fetal%20mortality%20rates%20by%20birthweight%20norway&f=false
We simply have much higher rates of low birthweight infants due to social factors (e.g., poverty) and lifestyle (e.g., drug abuse, high teen pregnancy rates) that have nothing to do with the medical care system.
After adjusting for our higher rate of deaths due to accidents and homicides, the U.S. is #1 in life expectancy (Table 1-5)
http://www.aei.org/docLib/9780844742403.pdf
In fact, it’s not even clear the U.S. “overspends” relative to other countries (Fig. 1-2)
http://www.aei.org/docLib/9780844742403.pdf
In short, many of the statistics used by liberals to beat up on the U.S. health care system to stampede everyone into thinking there’s a crisis that only Obama can fix turn out to be lies or damned lies.
You forgot the worst of them all: statistics.
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I’ve always said this. We know for certain that near-starvation diets extend life expectancy. Socialist economics are perfect for this.
Thanks, thats good ammo.
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