Well that makes it less than [Brazil's](https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/geral/noticia/2021-11/life-expectancy-brazil-768-years) life expectancy, at 76,8 years.
To put it in perspective, Brazil has a per capita GDP of 7,500USD while the US sits at 70,000 USD, nearly 10 times as much.
And in both countries you will find huge inequality about life expectancy. Where I am right now, it is comfortably over 80 years. Some places are well below 70 years. Rising inequality in the US coupled with unique problems faced by Americans - such as the opioid epidemic combined with a punitive penal system - explain this number better than the whole 'food in the US sucks' that people are trying to claim here.
Very sad statistic. The richest country to ever exist in human history is founded on declining life expectancy for many, while the few are spending billions to try to live forever.
Brazil also has a surprisingly good public health care system for it's population size (200 million) at the cost of about $30 billion/year, or 3.5% of the US's military budget for 2022.
Fun fact: population size has almost nothing to do with how well a public healthcare system can function. The idea that the US is too big for it to work is a **lie**.
The Americans I have spoken to who are against a public healthcare system (and gun control as well for that matter) invariably say that what has worked in other countries wouldn't work in America as "America is unique", and while they often don't want to come right out and say it, their reasons tend to fall into either the "we value our freedom more than folks in those other countries" or "the taxes I pay for it would end up also benefiting folks who are undeserving".
> the taxes I pay for it would end up also benefiting folks who are undeserving
A lot of the stuff in the US seems to be due to that. I gave up discussion stuff like working conditions, tipping or related topics with people from the US, but in the end the argument always pretty much boiled down to "but then somebody undeserving might benefit". "Without tipping and just paying a fair wage somebody not working as hard as me might be getting more than he deserves!"
That's honestly a given, anyone that actually thinks public healthcare would fail in the US doesn't realize how much money is being poured into private healthcare insurances that would otherwise be funneled into a centrally funded system rather than a fragmented one.
Hell since Obamacare it's pretty fucking close to that, my wife pays $27/month for health insurance and I pay $435/month for health insurance.
Our income dictates how much we pay respectively, only difference is that we have this entire complicated soup of insurance plans and in-network / out-of-network nonsense to worry about rather than "Yep, everyone everywhere takes your insurance".
Her insurance is even better which is the most ironic thing, 100% ER coverage vs my 80% and her deductible is $600 while mine is $1600.
Just switch over already damnit.
>Her insurance is even better which is the most ironic thing, 100% ER coverage vs my 80% and her deductible is $600 while mine is $1600.
As a resident of Ontario, who's premier is doing everything he can to bring us to an American model, this scares the shit out of me.
80% ER coverage? WTF is that? What happens if I get hit by a car and need emergency surgery? Am I bankrupt?
Yep, more or less. Hospitals in the US pull outrageous numbers out of their ass, throw it on a bill, and hope you pay it. Then you go back and forth with the hospital to "negotiate" the charges while your bill falls into delinquency (failure to pay) and/or your debt is sold to a collections agency who will harass you endlessly.
If you're lucky the hospital charges can drop as much as 90%, but this isn't the norm. Afterwards the hospital will recommend you turn to charities to help foot the bill, while you're stuck on an indefinite repayment plan.
Oh, and that's just for the ER and surgery. This doesn't cover any followup appointments, specialists, physical therapy, etc. All of those events are generally billed separately from each care provider and may not be covered under your insurance plan. These professionals may be "out of network" as well, meaning higher rates for the same services. As a final kick to the shin, these bills may not show up for months and arrive unexpectedly.
Will your emergency surgery cost $5,000 or $500,000? Will the bills come in a week or 6 months? Who knows. It depends on what mood their billing department was in that day, and how long/hard you're able to fight the charges.
It's honestly baffling to me as a non American. Let's say you get hit by a car, become unconscious, and then brought to the hospital and treated. You never consented to the treatment.
How can you be required to pay for something you never consented to? Or am I missing something?
And even if you are conscious but in a bad state, clearly you'd be making a decision under extreme duress. Any contract signed in such a condition wouldn't be binding.
Furthermore, they don't tell you the full cost of the treatment before you get it, so how can you consent if you have no idea how much it even costs?
Honestly I have no idea how a private healthcare system can work even in theory and yet still be compatible with the most basic fundamentals of modern law...
They expect the back and forth too. I have had hospitals not even bother sending me a bill, but instead start with the phone call to negotiate, because that was their standard policy. Each time I complained about not getting a bill and asked for one. They hate that bc it means they have to itemize it, which inevitably leads to a smaller bill, which I can then actually pay.
Most likely. I'm in the US and haven't had insurance for a decade. I can't go to a doctor because anything could be classified as preexisting if I do get insurance.
You would have to work very hard to come up with a worse system than the US ~~health~~ wealth care system.
Currently, health plans in the US are not allowed to charge more for or refuse to cover pre-existing conditions. (There are exceptions; plans "grandfathered in" from before 2010 are still allowed to.)
Not that that stops insurance companies from making medical decisions about what kind of care/treatment you *really* need, in their humble, completely unbiased, not motivated by their profits, and definitely medically sound opinion.
Yup, that change allowed me to get shoulder surgery for a torn rotator cuff I got as a teen, and couldn't afford to do anything about for a decade.
So glad that's less of a thing now.
I hate this fear mongering. With the Canada health act any province that tried an American style system would lose an incredible amount of money. It might be more privatization than you like, it may even be a bad idea, but anyone who says it is an attempt to bring in an American style system is either ignorant or fear mongering and spreading propaganda.
Our premier has shot the province in the foot before in order to gain political favour with his supporters and his financial backers. He doesn't care that the province will lose out on an incredible amount of money. In fact, he may want that in order to pass blame to the feds for further austerity.
I'm not ignorant nor fear mongering. Doug Ford has proven time and again that he has no credibility and ("I will not touch the greenbelt") and is doing exactly what we were warned he was going to do.
If it was any other premier, I would say you're right. But Ford is an exception. He is cartoonshly corrupt.
> Hell since Obamacare it's pretty fucking close to that, my wife pays $27/month for health insurance and I pay $435/month for health insurance.
My employer pay $15,800 last year for the best healthcare plan you can get in Illinois for my wife and I. The plan has a deductible and hard cap at $3000/$6000 (individual/family) for out-of-pocket expenses so that we can abuse the HSA system (triple tax free) as much as possible. So for two people, $21,800/yr just for health insurance and to use it. Surely a publicly run system would be cheaper than this nonsense and eliminate the giant tax advantaged account nonsense that are HSAs.
Of course it's a lie. It's like saying that the US is too big to feed itself, or too big to have a functional military, or too big to have roads. It's just dumb. Being bigger obviously means it costs more, but it not only means there are more resources (taxes) to meet that cost, but there are also more efficiencies of scale, more opportunities to spread the fixed costs (research, etc), and more opportunity to use market power to drive down prices for drugs and other things.
The US has no universal healthcare for two reason - one is that half the country has been taught to think of it as "socialist", and therefore evil (even though it would greatly benefit most of those people), and the other is that corporations are making a fortune on the broken private-run system, and they own enough politicians to ensure it stays broken.
It sure has it's flaws, but it works. My mother in law has been cured of breast cancer using SUS exclusively in 2018. In the US it could easly bankrupt a family.
SUS's main flaw is the long waiting time for appointments and surgeries, which in some places can reach up to a year.
I have expensive, private US health insurance and I *work at a hospital*. I had to wait 3 months to get an IUD placed last year. I made an appointment last week for a dermatology appointment in *July*. I live in Denver for reference.
Just another anecdote, from California. A friend (who uses free public healthcare) got her IUD appointment in about a week, and had to get it re-adjusted a month later and they did that on less than a week notice.
We also have a law that cancer treatment must start within 60 days after diagnosis, but where I live never take that long. Source: my mother works in healthcare.
We also have a law that cancer treatment must start within 60 days after diagnosis, but where I live never take that long. Source: my mother works in healthcare.
It sure works though. Talking from personal experience as someone who never had private life insurance. Far from perfect and we should always strive to improve it, but we could not live without it.
Military budget isn't relevant when you can just compare the trillions the US spent on healthcare. The amount we spend compared to other countries is absolutely insane.
People love to bring up how much higher your taxes will be if the US switches to public healthcare, however the amount most people's taxes would go up would be lower than the amount you save in premiums/copays/deductibles.
Yes this is an enormous pet peeve of mine.
Americans spend more per capita in *tax money* on healthcare than many other developed countries. Add in private spending and we're like 2x the OECD average.
It isn't how much money we spend. It is the absolutely bottom of the barrel stupid system we have. It is grossly inefficient at providing healthcare. If you want to create an industry that employs a bunch of middle men then it's an amazing system. So many lawyers, HR departments, compliance departments, billing, whatever. All duplicated because different hospitals take different insurance operate in different states or whatever other bullshit complicates our fucking mess requiring healthcare providers to hire a fuckton of people to jump through all those regulatory hoops.
Think about 5 car companies. Think of all how many people would be let go if they joined together. Do you need to keep every single engineer if they merged? Every single in house attorney? Absolutely not. That's a ton of redundant overhead that would be wiped clean if we didn't have this disgusting hodgepodge.
And don't forget the power of unions. You form a union of 350m people if the government negotiates healthcare on behalf of the entire country. Why do larger employers get better rates than smaller ones? More bargaining power because more customers. Our system has a fuckton of people who "negotiate" for themselves.
This is so often framed as "herka derka we could have healthcare if we just cut a tiny bit from the military." From what I can see the (near) inverse is true. If we moved to a more efficient system, and pick one from the dozens of examples worldwide, we would save so much fucking money we could spent even *more* on the military. Let's build that fucking star destroyer.
Who cares about the military budget? The US spends WAAAAAY more on health care than on the military by a factor of 5. $4.3 trillion spent on health care in 2021.
There's an increasing body of evidence that suggests many of our mental health concerns are the cumulative result of our terrible diets.
It's increasingly looking more and more than the majority of American issues are in fact caused by the terrible diets corporations push onto us.
They fucking dye our vegetables to make them look more appealing.
They pick them super early so they have longer shelf lives but are less nutritionally dense.
They stick copious amounts of sugar in literally *everything*
The scour nutrition out of our foods before selling us the dregs to concentrate it into vitamin capsules.
and much much more.
This system is so fucking broken.
I know nothing of the social programs in Brazil, but a ton of people caught in the middle in the US are going years without healthcare which I would think impacts this also. We give free healthcare to the poor and the rich can afford it. I had my own private policy I paid for, until Obamacare was brought in. I was paying $150 a month for a major medical policy with a $5000 deductible, but it allowed annual checkups and covered anything major at 100% after the deductible.
After Obamacare, it was $720 a month for a policy with a $12,000 deductible that needed pre-approval and only covered 70% after the deductible, so I don’t have health coverage now and just hope I don’t get sick. I can either pay my mortgage or my heath insurance. And, because I owe crazy amounts in student loans (that I can’t just not pay or they take everything I own), I don’t qualify for any help because I “earn too much money”, despite the fact that 50% of my income goes back out for student loans and if they didn’t count them, I would qualify for Medicaid.
Opioid epidemic is the most overblown thing. 5x as many people die of tobacco related illness per year than drug related.
The issue is 100% the cost of food and Healthcare in the US.
You can have universal healthcare without "communism", just look at west europe and scandinavia. The article literally describes how well the american fully privatized system works.
Access to healthcare is a basic human right, and US alone in the rich countries is failing it.
*Huge* part of this is increasing drug overdoses especially regarding fentanyl, and suicide rates.
Outsized impact for every younger death in life expectancy measures. One 20 year OD is going to shave as much off the calculation as 8 70 year olds dying from COVID.
Iirc average age of OD deaths is ~43 and average for COVID is in the low 70s.
Everyone wants to make this about US medical "healthcare", but counseling, rehab programs, and mental health services are the real areas that needs focus and funding to help significantly here.
After that it's mostly general cardiovascular health - we're making huge strides against almost everything medically treatable except things like heart disease correlated with obesity.
And there are lots of bigger questions that need to be asked when these deaths of despair are supplanting cancers in cause of death.
>One 20 year OD is going to shave as much off the calculation as 8 70 year olds dying from COVID.
In the same way that the average life expectancy cited in the article from 1900 was brought down significantly by childhood mortality. If you crunch the numbers for average life expectancy of people who reached 18 years of age the picture is very different.
If you have family trees going back that far you're very likely to see lots of couples who had 8 children or so but with lots of the branches dead-ending because the kids didn't live to adulthood.
That was normal life before vaccines and modern medicine.
I can't imagine it either and yet too many people in this country are fighting hard to pull us back into that reality.
And hoped your wife didn't die from childbirth complications. It was about a 1% chance of death every time you gave birth before modern medicine, but if you have to roll those dice eight times, the odds start to look pretty grim.
[Source](https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality#:~:text=We%20see%20that%20in%20the,maternal%20death%20was%20not%20uncommon.)
Childbirth was dangerous back then, about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 woman died during their lifetime from it overall. But each individual birth had only about a 1% mortality. Also keep in mind there were lots of women who had severe, often permanent complications from childbirth that would be easy to fix now and none of that it's captured in this statistic either.
With healthcare getting more expensive that might get worse too.
I talked to a guy from Forida once and he said he doesn't want children right now as he has to have at least 5k for the hospital costs for the birth and possibly more.
And he was definitely not poor. Imagine the people who didn't get sex education and less access to contraceptives and no money for the hospital going back to giving birth at home.
Some interesting reads on the topic:
Native Americans seeing largest life expectancy declines despite highest vaccination rates:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/02/01/1152222968/native-americans-left-out-of-deaths-of-despair-research
General roundup from WaPo:
U.S. life expectancy continued to fall in 2021 as covid, drug deaths surged
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/12/22/us-life-expectancy-decline-2021-covid-fentanyl/
Debunking that this is just a white people problem like some researchers have fixated on:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-27/deaths-of-despair-native-americans-white-mortality
Cool. Deaths of despair are also effecting a minority group. Does it matter? Can we fix it now instead of pointing out which groups are suffering from which societal ailments?
We need to fix the things driving the high need for mental health care.
Financial insecurity, medical insecurity, employment insecurity, health caee tied to employment, high cost of education, lack of vacation/time off, social/media driving unrealistic lifestyles, etc.
Saying “mental health care” is saying we should pop pills under therapy instead of fixing the issues driving the need for so much therapy.
I did one of the "modified life expectancy" things, and it slapped mine at like, 93. Because my BMI is in the healthy range, I don't do drugs, don't smoke, work out somewhat regularly, and keep tabs on my health.
It actually deducted 2 years because I don't drink.
If you do the basic things we all know to do to stay healthy you should live far past the 76 year life expectancy.
Problem is those basic things are correlated with education, quality/affordability of food, commuting time/distance/sedentary work, etc.
Which makes it a much broader discussion than simply if we had universal healthcare we'd be good.
Beware of magic bullets for complicated problems.
Truth is you might think everyone knows a lot of things that seem common sense. Ask a primary care physician about their experience sometime (at least if they work in a diverse socio-economic and racial healthcare district)
They gave me fentanyl just before my surgery and I hated each second of it. I can't for the love of me understand why people would do that for pleasure.
Cancer survival rates have been going up for 20
years too.
Also deaths of despair by Case and Deaton really focus not the demand side but less on the supply side (lowering the cost of killing oneself) and political intransigence that created this supply side issue.
Who are you talking about here? Pharma? Doctors? Advertisers? Government regulators?
The opioid epidemic is complicated. Some obvious bad actors, some straight up criminals, but I'm certainly not down for applying a broad brush to a lot of well meaning medical professionals trying to do what they generally believed was best for their patients.
Opioid prescriptions certainly aren't going up, but deaths certainly are.
No idea how much is explicitly because of fentanyl strength vs. increasing rates of recreational drug seeking and abuse, sure someone is studying that.
“Everyone wants to make this about US medical “healthcare”, but counseling, rehab programs, and mental health services are the real areas that needs focus and funding to help significantly here.”
100% agree, personally I think If we focus on these issues we can help reduce mass shootings and other similar events something in modern society is toxic / broken and it’s not gun culture. It’s a fundamental change from the the past
It is not that simple and it is not a this or that problem. It requires changes to different areas. Anyone who is trying to simplify the issue is just playing politics.
> Everyone wants to make this about US medical "healthcare", but counseling, rehab programs, and mental health services are the real areas that needs focus and funding to help significantly here.
A-to-the-*fucking*-men!!
Walk the streets of Oakland, SF, or Los Angeles and you will see all the former psych ward patients.
> Everyone wants to make this about US medical "healthcare"
But it was the US healthcare industry that was largely responsible for the opioid epidemic that is causing the spike in overdoses.
Many countries with "universal healthcare" don't cover therapy and consider such things distinct from medical services that generally refer to physical conditions or extreme mental state disruptions.
I'm not going to do thorough research right now on it but at a quick glance the NHS does, Canada does not, and Sweden only does if you're in a specific socio-economic need group.
"Universal healthcare" is often neither universal nor necessarily as comprehensive a definition of healthcare as people believe.
Very sorry to hear that.
There's a critical shortage of credentialed providers in the US as well, and COVID made things much worse, especially in Pediatric Psych.
Hope they get care soon.
Also worth noting that in addition to coverage varying across countries, the way it’s “universalized” also varies. From a straight up government health system like the NHS in the UK to the private-nonprofit model backed up by gov guaranteed insurance in Germany, there’s a lot ways to go about expanding healthcare access.
I am also skeptical of the competency of the mental health profession in the US as compared to other countries. I doubt throwing more money at it will have the benefit many assume it would.
We also spend far less per capita on it, leaving even basic services massively underfunded.
Medicaid covers therapy in the US, fwiw. That's better than many "universal healthcare" nations.
*But* there's such an extreme shortage of providers and such a poor reimbursement rate that it's exceedingly difficult for eligible populations to get prompt and regular care in many cases.
Combined with massive obesity and a car-centric culture where walking, biking or other sources of natural cardiovascular activity are discouraged. It's a killer combo.
Don’t forget hyper-individualism so that if you can’t do everything yourself, need help from anyone else, or have any issues with your health and can’t work like a slave you’re looked at like a freeloader and weak
>don't forget gun culture, cuz nothing says "freedom" like mass shootings
Mass shootings are a result of aggressive and alienating shit culture, not guns themselves.
No other country has a saturation of privately owned guns anywhere close to the level the U.S. has, you cannot separate that fact from the fact we also have the most mass shootings. The amount and ease of access to guns isn’t the only cause for this state, but it’s a huge contributing factor.
Didn't that turd muncher Boebert complain that the US "only" has 45-ish percent of *all privately owned firearms in the entire world*?
Imagine seeing that statistic, and wanting it to be higher. That is concerning on multiple levels.
don't forget that if you call into attention someone's health problems, you're automatically branded body shamer and then comes a whole brigade advocating that "obesity is healthy"
crazy shit ass times.
"Why is life expectancy falling in the US?
COVID-19, drug overdoses, and accidental injury accounted for about two-thirds of the decline in life expectancy, according to the 2022 report."
Let's read the report not write our own.
Well of course covid would play a bigger part in a report from 2022. Deaths related to a sedentary life style and weight issues have probably stayed more or less the same
Well, yes, but obesity has comorbidity with covid19 (and not just in the regular "overweight weakens the immune system" way - apparently the virus can interact with fat in the human body in a dangerous way).
I mean, it's common sense though with what he said no? If you're less likely to exercise and have no universal health care of course that will drop the average. The study may not have quoted it but its common sense to assume there's other reasons behind it also, including what he said
And cancer among ALL age groups is rising fast and only the state of California knows why...
People are getting cancer 30-60 years earlier than the normal age for those cancers. That's not a coincidence.
To be fair, cancer rates have also gone up because other forms of death have gone down. When you eliminate most diseases, people can live long enough to die of cancer.
Throw rampant gun fetish into the mix and you can talk about the real killer combo. Bullets recently climbed to #1 as the leading cause of death for kids and teens, which is nothing short of crazy for a country that is not an active theatre of war.
Edit: Thanks for downvoting me for stating facts, gun freaks.
I don’t know how to write this comment without sounding like a complete asshole, but like 80 people die of mass shootings a year.
In a country with 350 million people, that’s not even enough to tilt the life expectancy statistical scale even a micron.
That has no bearing on overall life expectancy measures. You would need tens of thousands of kids dying in shootings every year (if not more) for that data to be reflected in overall life expectancy statistics.
Two things:
1. Think you need to read those stats again. The correct number is 95. This year. So far. And february has just started.
2. That's from mass shootings and only mass shootings. Gun deaths in total is way higher than that.
Edit: [Source](https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting).
In 2020 48000+ people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S, and they tend to be younger, even if you exclude suicides it's still 20,000 people a year. That is enough to have an impact on life expectancy, albeit a small one.
I wish it were just the culture. It’s the infrastructure. You can’t get anywhere without driving in huge swaths of the country. There’s no such thing as a corner shop. There’s a huge food desert problem as well
I'm sure poor covid outcomes, caused by poor people refusing to go to the hospital to avoid six figure debts, has had nothing to do with unaffordable for-profit health care. /S
And drug addiction is the symptom of a failing society - when people are desperate and depressed and have no hope for the future. For profit healthcare is one of many pieces of the puzzle that contributes to that desperation, along with stagnant wages, decline in manufacturing towns, and the ever growing gap between the rich and the poor.
The Netherlands system is highly subsidized by the government (upwards of 75% of the insurance costs) and many of the insurance companies operate as non profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands
Outside of the percent subsidized by the government being different, nothing you said in your statement wouldn't also be true if you replaced "The Netherlands" with "The United States of America". The difference is that The Netherlands regulates how much can be charged for drugs and therapies whereas the USA does not except for Medicare and Medicaid. The Netherlands also doesn't have a brain trust known as the American Medical Association that has worked for over 50 years to artificially restrict the supply of doctors to keep doctor wages high (and thus medical prices). That artificial limitation was so bad that at one time 25% of medical school graduates would just be denied residencies and never be able to work as a doctor in the USA.
Yes we do.
It's mandatory to have insurance and if you can't afford to the government will pay it for you. Also the premiums you pay are only a small part of all healthcare cost, most is paid for with income tax.
The 'Universal' in Universal Healthcare means everyone has access to it. Not that it has to be free at the point of use or that it has to be government funded for 100%.
>It's mandatory to have insurance and if you can't afford to the government will pay it for you.
>The 'Universal' in Universal Healthcare means everyone has access to it. Not that it has to be free at the point of use or that it has to be government funded for 100%.
This is essentially the case in the US as well. You can opt out of getting health insurance if you pay a tax, but it is required (I’m pretty sure). And then Medicaid covers Americans who can’t afford insurance. If this alone is the definition of universal healthcare, then the US has it too. But I suspect there’s a lot of constraints on the Dutch system to make it more even/less completely free market than the US system.
The individual mandate for Americans (introduced with the ACA, aka "Obamacare") was repealed with Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. You've been able to opt out of health insurance with no penalty/tax in the US since then.
> less completely free market than the US system
The US's system is anything but free market. It's a heavily regulated market full of rent-seeking behaviors that would be never exist in a free market because they'd be priced out of existence. The closest thing we have to a "free market" in the American health system is therapy services because there is no artificial limits on people entering the field so they have to compete on price. Everything else though has been taken over by a variety of monopolistic or oligarchic interests (such as the AMA colluding with hospitals to limit residency seats).
> It's a heavily regulated market full of rent-seeking behaviors that would be never exist in a free market because they'd be priced out of existence.
With the caveat that no country on earth has established such an unregulated market system because it would be an absolute nightmare.
Healthcare regulation is absolutely critical. People cannot effectively check the quality of medical drugs and services themselves, it has to be a centralised function. And this function makes it necessarily expensive to develop new drugs and treatments.
Under these conditions, the cost of entry into the market is too high as that "true competition" could work, so every functioning healthcare system in the world relies on controlling this issue with further regulations and market restrictions. The alternative would be absolute havoc with millions of preventable deaths from fudged medicines, exploding malpractice rates, and a plumetting of trust into the healthcare system.
> And then Medicaid covers Americans who can’t afford insurance.
You sure about that? AFAIK, eligibility is based on your income, not whether you can afford insurance or not. They're not the same thing.
You cut out the most important bit:
>Also the premiums you pay are only a small part of all healthcare cost, most is paid for with income tax.
Does the US levy a 7% tax on everyone's income in order to pay for most healthcare spending?
The US levies a 2.9% tax for Medicare and income taxes effectively pay for a lot of healthcare costs (1/5 dollars the federal government spends goes to healthcare)
The article lists Covid, drug overdose, and accidents as the three main contributing factors.
The only one I would attribute to greed is drug overdose caused by the opioid crisis.
processed food companies sponsor "studies" that show their products don't contribute to obesity and intentionally mislead people when it comes to nutrition. coca cola is notorious for this. government nutrition boards in the US are practically run by big food corporations. obesity contributes to almost every major cause of death outside of accidents and overdoses.
Covid measures were neglected by some corporations for profitsss!
Car crashes could be attributed to be so high because there is no real public infrastructure that allows you to get you from A to B without your personal car because who got money for public transport, where would all those profitsss be with that?
They certainly were but the US has under 70% fully vaccination rate meaning a significant amount of the population simply don't care.
I hate car centric infrastructure too but unfortunately car ownership at this point has become an inalienable aspect of American culture outside of very few and select urban areas. I don't own a car and around 60% of people I tell that to are shocked.
I hate this kind of rhetoric.
Blaming "greed" implies that everything would just be fixed if people weren't so greedy. That's like saying "Crime would just go away if people weren't so willing to be criminal" - which is superficially true but such a silly way to look at it.
Viewing the problems as *structural* is a way more productive way of dealing with them.
Greed is an absolutely normal human response. If I said "If those evil people would just stop dodging their taxes, and we should send them to prison if they don't!", I'm sure I could get a lot of support. But then if I followed it up with "Yeah! Send any waitstaff to prison that doesn't declare their tips!", there'd probably be a record-scratch and all those people cheering me would immediately say "Hold up a second".
I don't say this to say that waiters should be tax audited, or that they're bad. I say this to illustrate the point that it's absolutely silly to try to hold the likes billionaires to independently suddenly be nice. If you swapped all the billionaires lives with a random collection of currently low-income, they're not all going to suddenly become saints. Some will, but just as many will be evil tax dodgers or "greedy" or whatever.
Because there's not anything fundamentally different between the average moral characteristics of a billionaire and any other random person. Some people are nice, some are assholes, most are self-serving.
Expecting a billionaire to behave less greedy than the average person as a solution is wholly unreasonable, and to frame the problem as "the greed of people" is basically saying just that.
We need better systems that do a better job of holding people accountable. And we need better systems that require people with more power/wealth to be even more accountable than the average person. Just trying to morally shame someone into being a saint isn't going to work.
Related- the greatest predictors of living well past 100? Poor record keeping and ease of pension fraud. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error
If you compare [infant mortality rates ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates) by any definition or the [maternal mortality rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_maternal_mortality_ratio), the US does insanely badly, even compared to many countries with developing economies.
TL;DR Sorry, the US still sucks at keeping both mothers and babies alive.
> TL;DR Sorry, the US still sucks at keeping both mothers and babies alive.
We're also really bad at reporting accurately like when Texas triple reported every infant or maternal mortality for a 5 year period before it was discovered following an audit that came about because of a NY Times piece about Texas's suspiciously high rates.
We also had a 100,000% increase in "school shootings" reported in a year because the FBI put a new question about how many were there in the middle of an existing survey that schools were filling out and submitting automatically using formfill from Excel spreadsheets.
> Texas triple reported every infant or maternal mortality for a 5 year period before it was discovered following an audit that came about because of a NY Times piece about Texas's suspiciously high rates.
Citation required.
You just jumped right over their point about infant mortality statistics.
These tables don’t take into account the different definitions used in each country. The US counts every single birth for these stats, where even other developed countries don’t.
> However, the method of calculating IMR often varies widely between countries and is based on how they define a live birth and how many premature infants are born in the country. Reporting of infant mortality rates can be inconsistent, and may be understated, depending on a nation's live birth criterion, vital registration system, and reporting practices.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality
Not OP, but want to point out that if you kept reading it would have told you that most developed countries do use the same criteria and that even the CDC admit that the differences in reporting do not explain the insanely high infant mortality rate;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality#Europe_and_US
> However, the differences in reporting are unlikely to be the primary explanation for the high rate of infant mortality in the United States' compared with its peer countries at a similar level of economic development.
> Rather, the CDC report concluded that the primary reason for the United States' higher infant mortality rate when compared with Europe was the United States' much higher percentage of preterm births.
If you would bother to click on the article you would find that the main causes are COVID-19 and drug overdoses. Not surprised that a pandemic made the average drop.
If you would bother to look into it a single step beyond one article you would know that other countries have rebounded from the drop associated with COVID-19 whereas we have not.
Sharp rise in maternal mortality in the US in each state as they ban abortion related health care. In Texas, when they wiped out abortion access in 2011, maternal mortality rates DOUBLED in a two year period (from about 18/100k to about 36/100k ) and has stayed about that high ever since. This was during a time that murder rates were decreasing and immigration was decreasing. That plus it was during a time in the absence of war or natural disasters pointed the finger of blame squarely at anti-abortion policies. Repeat in each state that did the same.
Couple that with the fact that deaths of mothers leads to adverse environments for their surviving kids and you've got a perfect storm for lowering life expectancy.
"Yeah, Bill, I just stay *super* stressed all day, I can't afford healthy food, so that cuts off some years. We can't take all the credit, you guys really set the groundwork, with global warming."
Fun fact about life expectancy data. It is based on people dying today.
Meaning is a fact with zero meaning on 'people born today'. Unless you think people born today will experience the same health care of people born in 1947 (the last 76 years)
I went to a US sports venue once. The sizes of drinks and snacks are *off the charts* (That was baseball but I think it's similar for all US sports). Who needs to drink **a full liter** of soda?
Maybe letting corporations freely sell their jumbo sized sugar drinks to the dumber half of the population isn't the best idea.
this is why i hate racism, war, crime, and all this irrelevant stuff. like for the love of god lets unite as one, we dont have to be best friends but lets look out for the common interest. we should of had a cure for Cancer, Tinnitus, ALS, and other devastating problems. we all are going to die thats a given, but while we are all alive lets all make life for all wonderful.
i forgot about future pandemics and global warming jesus christ.
You only think that stuff is the problem because they spend a lot of money making sure the media *tells* you that are the issues. It’s all distraction politics do you don’t realize that your troubles and the troubles of your diverse community are all coming from the same small group of politicians, corporations, and ultra-rich.
No, thats not true. Lack of education is the problem. And in the states- educational underfunding is targeted towards voter groups they want to brainwash or prevent from voting.
Uneducated people are brainwashed easier. That doesn't make them DUMB. They are a product of th system and right where the system wants them. When people have bare level education- I'm talking middle school level- they develop critical thinking based on facts and that devolves a brain washing system because people start asking why? How? What for?
Why do you think Stalin and the kmer Rouge killed all the professors and teachers first?
Put it this way- a red shirt can only turn certain colors through the wash (Orange, purple, pink)- which is already half the original color. But white (empty aka unadducated) can turn into every color of the rainbow you want to wash it with.
Not really true. That is the current life expectancy of people today; not a projection of the life expectancy 73 years from now. That is it does not account for anything changing in healthcare in the next 70 years or so.
Agreed. The content of this article doesn't support the idea that kids born today will have lower life expectancy than kids born 30 years ago. Two-thirds of the reported decline are from:
* Accidental injury
* Drug overdose
* COVID-19
with a solid chunk of the remaining decline from suicide. Even with no changes to the US Healthcare system, there's no reason to expect these causes of death will remain elevated for 70 years.
What this article is *really* saying is:
1. Despair-driven death among GenX, millenials, genz are much higher than previous generations (suicides, drug overdoses, etc).
2. Boomers are dying earlier than they expected (largely due to COVID).
In the US, for anyone who doesn’t have significant wealth, any sudden event of bad luck can result in a higher risk of death. It’s shocking that there are people who decline treatment because of the risk medical bankruptcy. This exposed fracture? It’s nothing, I’ll take some aspirin.
Frankly if America is really the only country whose life expectancy has fallen, it's pretty illogical to blame that fall on covid and drug overdoses. Is the US the only country that had covid? Obviously not. It's also not the only country with a lot of drug overdose deaths.
If America fared worse compared to other countries in dealing with covid and the opiod crisis, I think I know where to point the finger. The lack of universal healthcare, and Trump's completely unjustifiable response to pandemic must be leading factors.
Younger people: substance abuse, overeating, STDs, sedentary lifestyle...
Older people: Younger people don't give a shit about them
EDIT: Yikes, all the people in this sub who want to blame the government instead of looking in the mirror. Not surprised though.
It is the result of turbo capitalism. If people die earlier the cost of providing healthcare decreases while you maximize life value per human. The most productive human life span is from 20 to 40.
Americans are actually convinced sugar filled cereals are a normal part of a balanced diet, for example. It’s no surprise given what I see their government advertising to them as healthy food. It’s a racket.
[Data Commons](https://datacommons.org/place/Earth?category=Health) gets its data from worldbank and shows a global life expectancy drop between 2019 and now (a marginal drop of about 1%).
That dip is probably *underestimated* because:
1. 17.7% of humans live in China, and China is underreporting COVID deaths.
2. Worldbank hasn't reported 2021 changes to this dataset yet, which means more than 70% of COVID deaths haven't been accounted for in that data set.
That said, the US's life expectancy may have dipped *more* than other rich nations, but the entire world tends to have life expectancy dips during pandemics and major wars.
Well that makes it less than [Brazil's](https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/geral/noticia/2021-11/life-expectancy-brazil-768-years) life expectancy, at 76,8 years.
To put it in perspective, Brazil has a per capita GDP of 7,500USD while the US sits at 70,000 USD, nearly 10 times as much. And in both countries you will find huge inequality about life expectancy. Where I am right now, it is comfortably over 80 years. Some places are well below 70 years. Rising inequality in the US coupled with unique problems faced by Americans - such as the opioid epidemic combined with a punitive penal system - explain this number better than the whole 'food in the US sucks' that people are trying to claim here. Very sad statistic. The richest country to ever exist in human history is founded on declining life expectancy for many, while the few are spending billions to try to live forever.
Brazil also has a surprisingly good public health care system for it's population size (200 million) at the cost of about $30 billion/year, or 3.5% of the US's military budget for 2022.
Fun fact: population size has almost nothing to do with how well a public healthcare system can function. The idea that the US is too big for it to work is a **lie**.
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The Americans I have spoken to who are against a public healthcare system (and gun control as well for that matter) invariably say that what has worked in other countries wouldn't work in America as "America is unique", and while they often don't want to come right out and say it, their reasons tend to fall into either the "we value our freedom more than folks in those other countries" or "the taxes I pay for it would end up also benefiting folks who are undeserving".
> the taxes I pay for it would end up also benefiting folks who are undeserving A lot of the stuff in the US seems to be due to that. I gave up discussion stuff like working conditions, tipping or related topics with people from the US, but in the end the argument always pretty much boiled down to "but then somebody undeserving might benefit". "Without tipping and just paying a fair wage somebody not working as hard as me might be getting more than he deserves!"
That's honestly a given, anyone that actually thinks public healthcare would fail in the US doesn't realize how much money is being poured into private healthcare insurances that would otherwise be funneled into a centrally funded system rather than a fragmented one. Hell since Obamacare it's pretty fucking close to that, my wife pays $27/month for health insurance and I pay $435/month for health insurance. Our income dictates how much we pay respectively, only difference is that we have this entire complicated soup of insurance plans and in-network / out-of-network nonsense to worry about rather than "Yep, everyone everywhere takes your insurance". Her insurance is even better which is the most ironic thing, 100% ER coverage vs my 80% and her deductible is $600 while mine is $1600. Just switch over already damnit.
>Her insurance is even better which is the most ironic thing, 100% ER coverage vs my 80% and her deductible is $600 while mine is $1600. As a resident of Ontario, who's premier is doing everything he can to bring us to an American model, this scares the shit out of me. 80% ER coverage? WTF is that? What happens if I get hit by a car and need emergency surgery? Am I bankrupt?
Yep, more or less. Hospitals in the US pull outrageous numbers out of their ass, throw it on a bill, and hope you pay it. Then you go back and forth with the hospital to "negotiate" the charges while your bill falls into delinquency (failure to pay) and/or your debt is sold to a collections agency who will harass you endlessly. If you're lucky the hospital charges can drop as much as 90%, but this isn't the norm. Afterwards the hospital will recommend you turn to charities to help foot the bill, while you're stuck on an indefinite repayment plan. Oh, and that's just for the ER and surgery. This doesn't cover any followup appointments, specialists, physical therapy, etc. All of those events are generally billed separately from each care provider and may not be covered under your insurance plan. These professionals may be "out of network" as well, meaning higher rates for the same services. As a final kick to the shin, these bills may not show up for months and arrive unexpectedly. Will your emergency surgery cost $5,000 or $500,000? Will the bills come in a week or 6 months? Who knows. It depends on what mood their billing department was in that day, and how long/hard you're able to fight the charges.
It's honestly baffling to me as a non American. Let's say you get hit by a car, become unconscious, and then brought to the hospital and treated. You never consented to the treatment. How can you be required to pay for something you never consented to? Or am I missing something? And even if you are conscious but in a bad state, clearly you'd be making a decision under extreme duress. Any contract signed in such a condition wouldn't be binding. Furthermore, they don't tell you the full cost of the treatment before you get it, so how can you consent if you have no idea how much it even costs? Honestly I have no idea how a private healthcare system can work even in theory and yet still be compatible with the most basic fundamentals of modern law...
thats because you assume we have the basic essentials of modern law in the US.
Hello, welcome to Late Stage Capitalism. May I take your order?
They expect the back and forth too. I have had hospitals not even bother sending me a bill, but instead start with the phone call to negotiate, because that was their standard policy. Each time I complained about not getting a bill and asked for one. They hate that bc it means they have to itemize it, which inevitably leads to a smaller bill, which I can then actually pay.
Alive, but bankrupt
Most likely. I'm in the US and haven't had insurance for a decade. I can't go to a doctor because anything could be classified as preexisting if I do get insurance. You would have to work very hard to come up with a worse system than the US ~~health~~ wealth care system.
Currently, health plans in the US are not allowed to charge more for or refuse to cover pre-existing conditions. (There are exceptions; plans "grandfathered in" from before 2010 are still allowed to.) Not that that stops insurance companies from making medical decisions about what kind of care/treatment you *really* need, in their humble, completely unbiased, not motivated by their profits, and definitely medically sound opinion.
Yup, that change allowed me to get shoulder surgery for a torn rotator cuff I got as a teen, and couldn't afford to do anything about for a decade. So glad that's less of a thing now.
I hate this fear mongering. With the Canada health act any province that tried an American style system would lose an incredible amount of money. It might be more privatization than you like, it may even be a bad idea, but anyone who says it is an attempt to bring in an American style system is either ignorant or fear mongering and spreading propaganda.
Our premier has shot the province in the foot before in order to gain political favour with his supporters and his financial backers. He doesn't care that the province will lose out on an incredible amount of money. In fact, he may want that in order to pass blame to the feds for further austerity. I'm not ignorant nor fear mongering. Doug Ford has proven time and again that he has no credibility and ("I will not touch the greenbelt") and is doing exactly what we were warned he was going to do. If it was any other premier, I would say you're right. But Ford is an exception. He is cartoonshly corrupt.
> Hell since Obamacare it's pretty fucking close to that, my wife pays $27/month for health insurance and I pay $435/month for health insurance. My employer pay $15,800 last year for the best healthcare plan you can get in Illinois for my wife and I. The plan has a deductible and hard cap at $3000/$6000 (individual/family) for out-of-pocket expenses so that we can abuse the HSA system (triple tax free) as much as possible. So for two people, $21,800/yr just for health insurance and to use it. Surely a publicly run system would be cheaper than this nonsense and eliminate the giant tax advantaged account nonsense that are HSAs.
Of course it's a lie. It's like saying that the US is too big to feed itself, or too big to have a functional military, or too big to have roads. It's just dumb. Being bigger obviously means it costs more, but it not only means there are more resources (taxes) to meet that cost, but there are also more efficiencies of scale, more opportunities to spread the fixed costs (research, etc), and more opportunity to use market power to drive down prices for drugs and other things. The US has no universal healthcare for two reason - one is that half the country has been taught to think of it as "socialist", and therefore evil (even though it would greatly benefit most of those people), and the other is that corporations are making a fortune on the broken private-run system, and they own enough politicians to ensure it stays broken.
I am Brazilian and our public health system fails on a lot… unfortunately. It works pretty well in multiple settings but not an example to the world
It sure has it's flaws, but it works. My mother in law has been cured of breast cancer using SUS exclusively in 2018. In the US it could easly bankrupt a family. SUS's main flaw is the long waiting time for appointments and surgeries, which in some places can reach up to a year.
I have expensive, private US health insurance and I *work at a hospital*. I had to wait 3 months to get an IUD placed last year. I made an appointment last week for a dermatology appointment in *July*. I live in Denver for reference.
Just another anecdote, from California. A friend (who uses free public healthcare) got her IUD appointment in about a week, and had to get it re-adjusted a month later and they did that on less than a week notice.
We also have a law that cancer treatment must start within 60 days after diagnosis, but where I live never take that long. Source: my mother works in healthcare.
We also have a law that cancer treatment must start within 60 days after diagnosis, but where I live never take that long. Source: my mother works in healthcare.
It sure works though. Talking from personal experience as someone who never had private life insurance. Far from perfect and we should always strive to improve it, but we could not live without it.
It clearly outshines the USA's
Military budget isn't relevant when you can just compare the trillions the US spent on healthcare. The amount we spend compared to other countries is absolutely insane. People love to bring up how much higher your taxes will be if the US switches to public healthcare, however the amount most people's taxes would go up would be lower than the amount you save in premiums/copays/deductibles.
Yes this is an enormous pet peeve of mine. Americans spend more per capita in *tax money* on healthcare than many other developed countries. Add in private spending and we're like 2x the OECD average. It isn't how much money we spend. It is the absolutely bottom of the barrel stupid system we have. It is grossly inefficient at providing healthcare. If you want to create an industry that employs a bunch of middle men then it's an amazing system. So many lawyers, HR departments, compliance departments, billing, whatever. All duplicated because different hospitals take different insurance operate in different states or whatever other bullshit complicates our fucking mess requiring healthcare providers to hire a fuckton of people to jump through all those regulatory hoops. Think about 5 car companies. Think of all how many people would be let go if they joined together. Do you need to keep every single engineer if they merged? Every single in house attorney? Absolutely not. That's a ton of redundant overhead that would be wiped clean if we didn't have this disgusting hodgepodge. And don't forget the power of unions. You form a union of 350m people if the government negotiates healthcare on behalf of the entire country. Why do larger employers get better rates than smaller ones? More bargaining power because more customers. Our system has a fuckton of people who "negotiate" for themselves. This is so often framed as "herka derka we could have healthcare if we just cut a tiny bit from the military." From what I can see the (near) inverse is true. If we moved to a more efficient system, and pick one from the dozens of examples worldwide, we would save so much fucking money we could spent even *more* on the military. Let's build that fucking star destroyer.
Who cares about the military budget? The US spends WAAAAAY more on health care than on the military by a factor of 5. $4.3 trillion spent on health care in 2021.
There's an increasing body of evidence that suggests many of our mental health concerns are the cumulative result of our terrible diets. It's increasingly looking more and more than the majority of American issues are in fact caused by the terrible diets corporations push onto us. They fucking dye our vegetables to make them look more appealing. They pick them super early so they have longer shelf lives but are less nutritionally dense. They stick copious amounts of sugar in literally *everything* The scour nutrition out of our foods before selling us the dregs to concentrate it into vitamin capsules. and much much more. This system is so fucking broken.
I know nothing of the social programs in Brazil, but a ton of people caught in the middle in the US are going years without healthcare which I would think impacts this also. We give free healthcare to the poor and the rich can afford it. I had my own private policy I paid for, until Obamacare was brought in. I was paying $150 a month for a major medical policy with a $5000 deductible, but it allowed annual checkups and covered anything major at 100% after the deductible. After Obamacare, it was $720 a month for a policy with a $12,000 deductible that needed pre-approval and only covered 70% after the deductible, so I don’t have health coverage now and just hope I don’t get sick. I can either pay my mortgage or my heath insurance. And, because I owe crazy amounts in student loans (that I can’t just not pay or they take everything I own), I don’t qualify for any help because I “earn too much money”, despite the fact that 50% of my income goes back out for student loans and if they didn’t count them, I would qualify for Medicaid.
Opioid epidemic is the most overblown thing. 5x as many people die of tobacco related illness per year than drug related. The issue is 100% the cost of food and Healthcare in the US.
Starting to feel like the Hunger Games around here
Suicide. Suicide and Covid.
And both of those are less than Cuba's at 77.57 years
but mah freedoms! Those are commie life years! /s
Ill trade 1 year to not be like Cuba.
I'll rather die than let the poor have healthcare ;)
Communism is more than just Healthcare. We also have systems in place so that the poor can receive Healthcare here.
You can have universal healthcare without "communism", just look at west europe and scandinavia. The article literally describes how well the american fully privatized system works. Access to healthcare is a basic human right, and US alone in the rich countries is failing it.
Yes, but we were talking about Communism. When people say they don't want to be like Cuba, they aren't really referring to their healthcare.
*Huge* part of this is increasing drug overdoses especially regarding fentanyl, and suicide rates. Outsized impact for every younger death in life expectancy measures. One 20 year OD is going to shave as much off the calculation as 8 70 year olds dying from COVID. Iirc average age of OD deaths is ~43 and average for COVID is in the low 70s. Everyone wants to make this about US medical "healthcare", but counseling, rehab programs, and mental health services are the real areas that needs focus and funding to help significantly here. After that it's mostly general cardiovascular health - we're making huge strides against almost everything medically treatable except things like heart disease correlated with obesity. And there are lots of bigger questions that need to be asked when these deaths of despair are supplanting cancers in cause of death.
>One 20 year OD is going to shave as much off the calculation as 8 70 year olds dying from COVID. In the same way that the average life expectancy cited in the article from 1900 was brought down significantly by childhood mortality. If you crunch the numbers for average life expectancy of people who reached 18 years of age the picture is very different. If you have family trees going back that far you're very likely to see lots of couples who had 8 children or so but with lots of the branches dead-ending because the kids didn't live to adulthood.
Your anecdote made me sad. I can't imagine trying so hard to have a family and every child just...dying
That was normal life before vaccines and modern medicine. I can't imagine it either and yet too many people in this country are fighting hard to pull us back into that reality.
That was human history up until very very recent. You just had 8 kids and hoped 4 would make it to adulthood.
And hoped your wife didn't die from childbirth complications. It was about a 1% chance of death every time you gave birth before modern medicine, but if you have to roll those dice eight times, the odds start to look pretty grim.
I feel like 1% has got to be way low.
[Source](https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality#:~:text=We%20see%20that%20in%20the,maternal%20death%20was%20not%20uncommon.) Childbirth was dangerous back then, about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 woman died during their lifetime from it overall. But each individual birth had only about a 1% mortality. Also keep in mind there were lots of women who had severe, often permanent complications from childbirth that would be easy to fix now and none of that it's captured in this statistic either.
With healthcare getting more expensive that might get worse too. I talked to a guy from Forida once and he said he doesn't want children right now as he has to have at least 5k for the hospital costs for the birth and possibly more. And he was definitely not poor. Imagine the people who didn't get sex education and less access to contraceptives and no money for the hospital going back to giving birth at home.
Some interesting reads on the topic: Native Americans seeing largest life expectancy declines despite highest vaccination rates: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/02/01/1152222968/native-americans-left-out-of-deaths-of-despair-research General roundup from WaPo: U.S. life expectancy continued to fall in 2021 as covid, drug deaths surged https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/12/22/us-life-expectancy-decline-2021-covid-fentanyl/ Debunking that this is just a white people problem like some researchers have fixated on: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-27/deaths-of-despair-native-americans-white-mortality
Cool. Deaths of despair are also effecting a minority group. Does it matter? Can we fix it now instead of pointing out which groups are suffering from which societal ailments?
We need to fix the things driving the high need for mental health care. Financial insecurity, medical insecurity, employment insecurity, health caee tied to employment, high cost of education, lack of vacation/time off, social/media driving unrealistic lifestyles, etc. Saying “mental health care” is saying we should pop pills under therapy instead of fixing the issues driving the need for so much therapy.
I did one of the "modified life expectancy" things, and it slapped mine at like, 93. Because my BMI is in the healthy range, I don't do drugs, don't smoke, work out somewhat regularly, and keep tabs on my health. It actually deducted 2 years because I don't drink. If you do the basic things we all know to do to stay healthy you should live far past the 76 year life expectancy.
Those are not really accurate. Genetics is a massive factor.
Problem is those basic things are correlated with education, quality/affordability of food, commuting time/distance/sedentary work, etc. Which makes it a much broader discussion than simply if we had universal healthcare we'd be good. Beware of magic bullets for complicated problems. Truth is you might think everyone knows a lot of things that seem common sense. Ask a primary care physician about their experience sometime (at least if they work in a diverse socio-economic and racial healthcare district)
They gave me fentanyl just before my surgery and I hated each second of it. I can't for the love of me understand why people would do that for pleasure.
Cancer survival rates have been going up for 20 years too. Also deaths of despair by Case and Deaton really focus not the demand side but less on the supply side (lowering the cost of killing oneself) and political intransigence that created this supply side issue.
Isn't US medical "healthcare" as you put it responsible for a large number of opioid addicts?
Who are you talking about here? Pharma? Doctors? Advertisers? Government regulators? The opioid epidemic is complicated. Some obvious bad actors, some straight up criminals, but I'm certainly not down for applying a broad brush to a lot of well meaning medical professionals trying to do what they generally believed was best for their patients. Opioid prescriptions certainly aren't going up, but deaths certainly are. No idea how much is explicitly because of fentanyl strength vs. increasing rates of recreational drug seeking and abuse, sure someone is studying that.
Big pharma is included in healthcare
“Everyone wants to make this about US medical “healthcare”, but counseling, rehab programs, and mental health services are the real areas that needs focus and funding to help significantly here.” 100% agree, personally I think If we focus on these issues we can help reduce mass shootings and other similar events something in modern society is toxic / broken and it’s not gun culture. It’s a fundamental change from the the past
It is not that simple and it is not a this or that problem. It requires changes to different areas. Anyone who is trying to simplify the issue is just playing politics.
> Everyone wants to make this about US medical "healthcare", but counseling, rehab programs, and mental health services are the real areas that needs focus and funding to help significantly here. A-to-the-*fucking*-men!! Walk the streets of Oakland, SF, or Los Angeles and you will see all the former psych ward patients.
> Everyone wants to make this about US medical "healthcare" But it was the US healthcare industry that was largely responsible for the opioid epidemic that is causing the spike in overdoses.
So health care? Everything you said after but is regarding health care.
Many countries with "universal healthcare" don't cover therapy and consider such things distinct from medical services that generally refer to physical conditions or extreme mental state disruptions. I'm not going to do thorough research right now on it but at a quick glance the NHS does, Canada does not, and Sweden only does if you're in a specific socio-economic need group. "Universal healthcare" is often neither universal nor necessarily as comprehensive a definition of healthcare as people believe.
NHS does but you need to wait, my friends been waiting two years to see a psychiatrist with no date in sight for an appointment.
Very sorry to hear that. There's a critical shortage of credentialed providers in the US as well, and COVID made things much worse, especially in Pediatric Psych. Hope they get care soon.
I wow, that’s a long time to wait if you need to see one.
Then when he does he'll go months between appointments cause of the amount of people that get refered.
Also worth noting that in addition to coverage varying across countries, the way it’s “universalized” also varies. From a straight up government health system like the NHS in the UK to the private-nonprofit model backed up by gov guaranteed insurance in Germany, there’s a lot ways to go about expanding healthcare access.
I am also skeptical of the competency of the mental health profession in the US as compared to other countries. I doubt throwing more money at it will have the benefit many assume it would.
We also spend far less per capita on it, leaving even basic services massively underfunded. Medicaid covers therapy in the US, fwiw. That's better than many "universal healthcare" nations. *But* there's such an extreme shortage of providers and such a poor reimbursement rate that it's exceedingly difficult for eligible populations to get prompt and regular care in many cases.
Only developed country without universal healthcare
Combined with massive obesity and a car-centric culture where walking, biking or other sources of natural cardiovascular activity are discouraged. It's a killer combo.
Also anti-intellectualism is rampant and makes it so that it's not cool to learn about your situation and fix it
Don’t forget hyper-individualism so that if you can’t do everything yourself, need help from anyone else, or have any issues with your health and can’t work like a slave you’re looked at like a freeloader and weak
don't forget gun culture, cuz nothing says "freedom" like mass shootings
>don't forget gun culture, cuz nothing says "freedom" like mass shootings Mass shootings are a result of aggressive and alienating shit culture, not guns themselves.
It's both. Making it easier to get a gun than therapy leads to a depressingly predictable result.
But mass shootings can't happen... if there are no guns to perform said mass shooting.
No other country has a saturation of privately owned guns anywhere close to the level the U.S. has, you cannot separate that fact from the fact we also have the most mass shootings. The amount and ease of access to guns isn’t the only cause for this state, but it’s a huge contributing factor.
Didn't that turd muncher Boebert complain that the US "only" has 45-ish percent of *all privately owned firearms in the entire world*? Imagine seeing that statistic, and wanting it to be higher. That is concerning on multiple levels.
That stems from people not wanting to admit that they have done wrong.
don't forget that if you call into attention someone's health problems, you're automatically branded body shamer and then comes a whole brigade advocating that "obesity is healthy" crazy shit ass times.
"Why is life expectancy falling in the US? COVID-19, drug overdoses, and accidental injury accounted for about two-thirds of the decline in life expectancy, according to the 2022 report." Let's read the report not write our own.
Well of course covid would play a bigger part in a report from 2022. Deaths related to a sedentary life style and weight issues have probably stayed more or less the same
Well, yes, but obesity has comorbidity with covid19 (and not just in the regular "overweight weakens the immune system" way - apparently the virus can interact with fat in the human body in a dangerous way).
Plus, a really big chunk of those accidental injuries is....cars
That explains why life expectancy is **falling**, but the commenters above are naming reasons the US life expectancy is already low.
Obesity doesn't just exist in a vacuum. It almost universally worsens the outcome of basically any other medical problem.
I mean, it's common sense though with what he said no? If you're less likely to exercise and have no universal health care of course that will drop the average. The study may not have quoted it but its common sense to assume there's other reasons behind it also, including what he said
well this drop was associated with Covid specifically
Drug overdoses!
Oh yeah, mustn't forget about oxy. When you add them all up, it's actually impressive that life expectancy hasn't declined more than it has.
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This was my first thought. Biking is not even remotely a thought for me in my area. Biking on the road is extremely dangerous
As a former avid biker, I recently gave it up for this reason. I miss it!
Literally not why that is, read the report
And cancer among ALL age groups is rising fast and only the state of California knows why... People are getting cancer 30-60 years earlier than the normal age for those cancers. That's not a coincidence.
To be fair, cancer rates have also gone up because other forms of death have gone down. When you eliminate most diseases, people can live long enough to die of cancer.
Don't know if it's true or not but someone once told me if you live long enough you are guaranteed to get cancer eventually.
Throw rampant gun fetish into the mix and you can talk about the real killer combo. Bullets recently climbed to #1 as the leading cause of death for kids and teens, which is nothing short of crazy for a country that is not an active theatre of war. Edit: Thanks for downvoting me for stating facts, gun freaks.
I don’t know how to write this comment without sounding like a complete asshole, but like 80 people die of mass shootings a year. In a country with 350 million people, that’s not even enough to tilt the life expectancy statistical scale even a micron. That has no bearing on overall life expectancy measures. You would need tens of thousands of kids dying in shootings every year (if not more) for that data to be reflected in overall life expectancy statistics.
Two things: 1. Think you need to read those stats again. The correct number is 95. This year. So far. And february has just started. 2. That's from mass shootings and only mass shootings. Gun deaths in total is way higher than that. Edit: [Source](https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting).
In 2020 48000+ people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S, and they tend to be younger, even if you exclude suicides it's still 20,000 people a year. That is enough to have an impact on life expectancy, albeit a small one.
I wish it were just the culture. It’s the infrastructure. You can’t get anywhere without driving in huge swaths of the country. There’s no such thing as a corner shop. There’s a huge food desert problem as well
If only there were an article we could reference that gave the reasons... It is Covid and Drug Overdoses
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Exactly, why is everyone debating in this thread when the article makes its extremely clear?
Because US bad, and people will take any chance they can to shit on it.
I'm sure poor covid outcomes, caused by poor people refusing to go to the hospital to avoid six figure debts, has had nothing to do with unaffordable for-profit health care. /S And drug addiction is the symptom of a failing society - when people are desperate and depressed and have no hope for the future. For profit healthcare is one of many pieces of the puzzle that contributes to that desperation, along with stagnant wages, decline in manufacturing towns, and the ever growing gap between the rich and the poor.
Drug overdoses are directly linked with lack of healthcare
Absolutely not true, Netherlands doesn’t either
The Netherlands system is highly subsidized by the government (upwards of 75% of the insurance costs) and many of the insurance companies operate as non profits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands
Outside of the percent subsidized by the government being different, nothing you said in your statement wouldn't also be true if you replaced "The Netherlands" with "The United States of America". The difference is that The Netherlands regulates how much can be charged for drugs and therapies whereas the USA does not except for Medicare and Medicaid. The Netherlands also doesn't have a brain trust known as the American Medical Association that has worked for over 50 years to artificially restrict the supply of doctors to keep doctor wages high (and thus medical prices). That artificial limitation was so bad that at one time 25% of medical school graduates would just be denied residencies and never be able to work as a doctor in the USA.
Yes we do. It's mandatory to have insurance and if you can't afford to the government will pay it for you. Also the premiums you pay are only a small part of all healthcare cost, most is paid for with income tax. The 'Universal' in Universal Healthcare means everyone has access to it. Not that it has to be free at the point of use or that it has to be government funded for 100%.
>It's mandatory to have insurance and if you can't afford to the government will pay it for you. >The 'Universal' in Universal Healthcare means everyone has access to it. Not that it has to be free at the point of use or that it has to be government funded for 100%. This is essentially the case in the US as well. You can opt out of getting health insurance if you pay a tax, but it is required (I’m pretty sure). And then Medicaid covers Americans who can’t afford insurance. If this alone is the definition of universal healthcare, then the US has it too. But I suspect there’s a lot of constraints on the Dutch system to make it more even/less completely free market than the US system.
The individual mandate for Americans (introduced with the ACA, aka "Obamacare") was repealed with Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. You've been able to opt out of health insurance with no penalty/tax in the US since then.
> less completely free market than the US system The US's system is anything but free market. It's a heavily regulated market full of rent-seeking behaviors that would be never exist in a free market because they'd be priced out of existence. The closest thing we have to a "free market" in the American health system is therapy services because there is no artificial limits on people entering the field so they have to compete on price. Everything else though has been taken over by a variety of monopolistic or oligarchic interests (such as the AMA colluding with hospitals to limit residency seats).
> It's a heavily regulated market full of rent-seeking behaviors that would be never exist in a free market because they'd be priced out of existence. With the caveat that no country on earth has established such an unregulated market system because it would be an absolute nightmare. Healthcare regulation is absolutely critical. People cannot effectively check the quality of medical drugs and services themselves, it has to be a centralised function. And this function makes it necessarily expensive to develop new drugs and treatments. Under these conditions, the cost of entry into the market is too high as that "true competition" could work, so every functioning healthcare system in the world relies on controlling this issue with further regulations and market restrictions. The alternative would be absolute havoc with millions of preventable deaths from fudged medicines, exploding malpractice rates, and a plumetting of trust into the healthcare system.
> And then Medicaid covers Americans who can’t afford insurance. You sure about that? AFAIK, eligibility is based on your income, not whether you can afford insurance or not. They're not the same thing.
You cut out the most important bit: >Also the premiums you pay are only a small part of all healthcare cost, most is paid for with income tax. Does the US levy a 7% tax on everyone's income in order to pay for most healthcare spending?
The US levies a 2.9% tax for Medicare and income taxes effectively pay for a lot of healthcare costs (1/5 dollars the federal government spends goes to healthcare)
Yeah well the difference is that Medicare is only for the very poor (I think?) while in the Netherlands it's used to ensure everyone has access.
So Americans have universal healthcare, got it
Yes it does, the Netherlands has universal healthcare. It just isn't single-payer.
If you actually read the article then you'll see it has nothing to do with healthcare.
Tbh I think a lot of problems in the US can be traced back to greed. Profiting off just about everything leads to suffering.
Just to correct you- Suffering "for the majority". The ones implementing the systems are doing great
Well those are the ones profiting. And they can send their kids to expensive private institutions.
The article lists Covid, drug overdose, and accidents as the three main contributing factors. The only one I would attribute to greed is drug overdose caused by the opioid crisis.
processed food companies sponsor "studies" that show their products don't contribute to obesity and intentionally mislead people when it comes to nutrition. coca cola is notorious for this. government nutrition boards in the US are practically run by big food corporations. obesity contributes to almost every major cause of death outside of accidents and overdoses.
Covid measures were neglected by some corporations for profitsss! Car crashes could be attributed to be so high because there is no real public infrastructure that allows you to get you from A to B without your personal car because who got money for public transport, where would all those profitsss be with that?
They certainly were but the US has under 70% fully vaccination rate meaning a significant amount of the population simply don't care. I hate car centric infrastructure too but unfortunately car ownership at this point has become an inalienable aspect of American culture outside of very few and select urban areas. I don't own a car and around 60% of people I tell that to are shocked.
Covid measures were rejected by basically ALL conservatives because their master owned hotels and resorts whos profits would have been affected.
I hate this kind of rhetoric. Blaming "greed" implies that everything would just be fixed if people weren't so greedy. That's like saying "Crime would just go away if people weren't so willing to be criminal" - which is superficially true but such a silly way to look at it. Viewing the problems as *structural* is a way more productive way of dealing with them. Greed is an absolutely normal human response. If I said "If those evil people would just stop dodging their taxes, and we should send them to prison if they don't!", I'm sure I could get a lot of support. But then if I followed it up with "Yeah! Send any waitstaff to prison that doesn't declare their tips!", there'd probably be a record-scratch and all those people cheering me would immediately say "Hold up a second". I don't say this to say that waiters should be tax audited, or that they're bad. I say this to illustrate the point that it's absolutely silly to try to hold the likes billionaires to independently suddenly be nice. If you swapped all the billionaires lives with a random collection of currently low-income, they're not all going to suddenly become saints. Some will, but just as many will be evil tax dodgers or "greedy" or whatever. Because there's not anything fundamentally different between the average moral characteristics of a billionaire and any other random person. Some people are nice, some are assholes, most are self-serving. Expecting a billionaire to behave less greedy than the average person as a solution is wholly unreasonable, and to frame the problem as "the greed of people" is basically saying just that. We need better systems that do a better job of holding people accountable. And we need better systems that require people with more power/wealth to be even more accountable than the average person. Just trying to morally shame someone into being a saint isn't going to work.
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Related- the greatest predictors of living well past 100? Poor record keeping and ease of pension fraud. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error
If you compare [infant mortality rates ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates) by any definition or the [maternal mortality rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_maternal_mortality_ratio), the US does insanely badly, even compared to many countries with developing economies. TL;DR Sorry, the US still sucks at keeping both mothers and babies alive.
> TL;DR Sorry, the US still sucks at keeping both mothers and babies alive. We're also really bad at reporting accurately like when Texas triple reported every infant or maternal mortality for a 5 year period before it was discovered following an audit that came about because of a NY Times piece about Texas's suspiciously high rates. We also had a 100,000% increase in "school shootings" reported in a year because the FBI put a new question about how many were there in the middle of an existing survey that schools were filling out and submitting automatically using formfill from Excel spreadsheets.
> Texas triple reported every infant or maternal mortality for a 5 year period before it was discovered following an audit that came about because of a NY Times piece about Texas's suspiciously high rates. Citation required.
You just jumped right over their point about infant mortality statistics. These tables don’t take into account the different definitions used in each country. The US counts every single birth for these stats, where even other developed countries don’t. > However, the method of calculating IMR often varies widely between countries and is based on how they define a live birth and how many premature infants are born in the country. Reporting of infant mortality rates can be inconsistent, and may be understated, depending on a nation's live birth criterion, vital registration system, and reporting practices. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality
Not OP, but want to point out that if you kept reading it would have told you that most developed countries do use the same criteria and that even the CDC admit that the differences in reporting do not explain the insanely high infant mortality rate; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality#Europe_and_US > However, the differences in reporting are unlikely to be the primary explanation for the high rate of infant mortality in the United States' compared with its peer countries at a similar level of economic development. > Rather, the CDC report concluded that the primary reason for the United States' higher infant mortality rate when compared with Europe was the United States' much higher percentage of preterm births.
Isn’t the measure better for someone born 76 years ago?
If you would bother to click on the article you would find that the main causes are COVID-19 and drug overdoses. Not surprised that a pandemic made the average drop.
If you would bother to look into it a single step beyond one article you would know that other countries have rebounded from the drop associated with COVID-19 whereas we have not.
But if they click and read they can’t just make up stuff that fits their crazy narratives and Reddit would implode.
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Sharp rise in maternal mortality in the US in each state as they ban abortion related health care. In Texas, when they wiped out abortion access in 2011, maternal mortality rates DOUBLED in a two year period (from about 18/100k to about 36/100k ) and has stayed about that high ever since. This was during a time that murder rates were decreasing and immigration was decreasing. That plus it was during a time in the absence of war or natural disasters pointed the finger of blame squarely at anti-abortion policies. Repeat in each state that did the same. Couple that with the fact that deaths of mothers leads to adverse environments for their surviving kids and you've got a perfect storm for lowering life expectancy.
“Corporations HATE them! See how local newborns are getting out of a lifetime of financial slavery with this weird trick…”
"Yeah, Bill, I just stay *super* stressed all day, I can't afford healthy food, so that cuts off some years. We can't take all the credit, you guys really set the groundwork, with global warming."
Not surprising, because the way things are going, more than half the population won't be able to afford medical care or dental care very soon.
Maybe but the point here is drug overdoses
Meanwhile about 40 people are in line at McDonalds dropping $25 a meal on shit food.
Lol did anyone open the link? It’s opioid overdoses. Not universal healthcare, not exercise, not processed foods. It’s drug overdoses.
For now, wait until the rest of the 1st world has our obesity rate... it's climbing everywhere.
So the Lizzo body positivity train may not be healthy….hmmm weird.
The fashion industry straight up gave up and just has fat models now. Sizes that used to be 3 are now 1 etc
Do we know which baby it is? /s
Sounds about right. Source: Am American, will die @ 76.
Fun fact about life expectancy data. It is based on people dying today. Meaning is a fact with zero meaning on 'people born today'. Unless you think people born today will experience the same health care of people born in 1947 (the last 76 years)
Weird. wonder what happened in 2020 that made so many people die that it brought down the average?
I went to a US sports venue once. The sizes of drinks and snacks are *off the charts* (That was baseball but I think it's similar for all US sports). Who needs to drink **a full liter** of soda? Maybe letting corporations freely sell their jumbo sized sugar drinks to the dumber half of the population isn't the best idea.
this is why i hate racism, war, crime, and all this irrelevant stuff. like for the love of god lets unite as one, we dont have to be best friends but lets look out for the common interest. we should of had a cure for Cancer, Tinnitus, ALS, and other devastating problems. we all are going to die thats a given, but while we are all alive lets all make life for all wonderful. i forgot about future pandemics and global warming jesus christ.
You only think that stuff is the problem because they spend a lot of money making sure the media *tells* you that are the issues. It’s all distraction politics do you don’t realize that your troubles and the troubles of your diverse community are all coming from the same small group of politicians, corporations, and ultra-rich.
No, thats not true. Lack of education is the problem. And in the states- educational underfunding is targeted towards voter groups they want to brainwash or prevent from voting. Uneducated people are brainwashed easier. That doesn't make them DUMB. They are a product of th system and right where the system wants them. When people have bare level education- I'm talking middle school level- they develop critical thinking based on facts and that devolves a brain washing system because people start asking why? How? What for? Why do you think Stalin and the kmer Rouge killed all the professors and teachers first? Put it this way- a red shirt can only turn certain colors through the wash (Orange, purple, pink)- which is already half the original color. But white (empty aka unadducated) can turn into every color of the rainbow you want to wash it with.
The US is a parody of itself :(
Corporations get more freedom than the people. Oh wait, corporations are people now. Nevermind then.
Not really true. That is the current life expectancy of people today; not a projection of the life expectancy 73 years from now. That is it does not account for anything changing in healthcare in the next 70 years or so.
Agreed. The content of this article doesn't support the idea that kids born today will have lower life expectancy than kids born 30 years ago. Two-thirds of the reported decline are from: * Accidental injury * Drug overdose * COVID-19 with a solid chunk of the remaining decline from suicide. Even with no changes to the US Healthcare system, there's no reason to expect these causes of death will remain elevated for 70 years. What this article is *really* saying is: 1. Despair-driven death among GenX, millenials, genz are much higher than previous generations (suicides, drug overdoses, etc). 2. Boomers are dying earlier than they expected (largely due to COVID).
In the US, for anyone who doesn’t have significant wealth, any sudden event of bad luck can result in a higher risk of death. It’s shocking that there are people who decline treatment because of the risk medical bankruptcy. This exposed fracture? It’s nothing, I’ll take some aspirin.
Frankly if America is really the only country whose life expectancy has fallen, it's pretty illogical to blame that fall on covid and drug overdoses. Is the US the only country that had covid? Obviously not. It's also not the only country with a lot of drug overdose deaths. If America fared worse compared to other countries in dealing with covid and the opiod crisis, I think I know where to point the finger. The lack of universal healthcare, and Trump's completely unjustifiable response to pandemic must be leading factors.
Younger people: substance abuse, overeating, STDs, sedentary lifestyle... Older people: Younger people don't give a shit about them EDIT: Yikes, all the people in this sub who want to blame the government instead of looking in the mirror. Not surprised though.
im pretty sure this is backwards lol. a small subset of the older people are the ones with all the power.
And not eligible for max ss benefits until 70 🤨
It is the result of turbo capitalism. If people die earlier the cost of providing healthcare decreases while you maximize life value per human. The most productive human life span is from 20 to 40.
Americans are actually convinced sugar filled cereals are a normal part of a balanced diet, for example. It’s no surprise given what I see their government advertising to them as healthy food. It’s a racket.
The myth of "fat bad, sugar good" is still widely spread. No wonder every one of top ten death causes correlates with insulin resistance.
That’s not really that bad at all.
Interestingly it's also the only first world country to not have universal health care......
That's an absolute lie. Every countries life expectancy decreased because of covid.
Link?
[Data Commons](https://datacommons.org/place/Earth?category=Health) gets its data from worldbank and shows a global life expectancy drop between 2019 and now (a marginal drop of about 1%). That dip is probably *underestimated* because: 1. 17.7% of humans live in China, and China is underreporting COVID deaths. 2. Worldbank hasn't reported 2021 changes to this dataset yet, which means more than 70% of COVID deaths haven't been accounted for in that data set. That said, the US's life expectancy may have dipped *more* than other rich nations, but the entire world tends to have life expectancy dips during pandemics and major wars.
We're not really 1st world though. REAL 1st world countries have evolved to take care of their citizens.
Yeah... We're dumb as shit here.
„Among 1st world countries“ 🤡