PS: Medical outcomes are far more dependent on the average level of care than the peek level of care. EX: There is a lot of evidence that the average doctor is significantly more effective than a "high preforming" doctor that is sleep deprived.
Doesn't that depend on the starting point? For example, NHS started during the post WWII depression in the UK. The US isn't starting from there.
I'm trying to track down the stats, but I've heard that the US lifespan is world-longest if you adjust for accidents and homicide, two things that aren't affected by healthcare.
> Granted, the US has a bad habit of poorly implemented government programs so who knows, we may be the first exception.
The US govt gets the same amount of tax revenue per person as the "rich" EU countries. If the benefits are less ....
Other measures of health care quality, such as infant mortality, are worse in the US than in many other countries. So I doubt it.
Nope. The US spends far more on trying to save the lives of premature and sickly newborns than any other country. Many these don;t make it after being born and show up in the stats as "high infant mortality". This approach also drives up health care costs.
One can argue (having met two crack babies that survived, I personally would be tempted to in many cases) that US hospitals shouldn't do this, but nevertheless they do do it. And it costs money and skews statistics.
I also have personally experienced health care in other countries (Greece, Mexico, China -- where my wife was a doctor). No thanks.
Healthcare is quite involved in dealing with the effects of accidents on humans. So I would think that death rate from accidents, broadly speaking, is not independent from level of healthcare. Or is that a technical term that already distinguishes between those that survive the accident long enough to possibly receive treatment and those that don't?
There are two numbers - the accident rate, which is independent of healthcare, and the "how good was treatment for accident victims" number, which does depend on healthcare. Their product is the death rate from accidents.
Here are two populations that demonstrate these effects.
In population 1, everyone has an accident each year and 90% survive. That's 10% deaths due to accidents.
In population 2, 10% of the population has an accident, and only 50% of accident victims survive. That's 5% deaths due to accidents.
If the accidents are the same, it's silly to argue that population 2 has better "accident healthcare" even though its death rate due to accidents is half of population 1's.
If the accidents are different, it's impossible to say which population has better accident healthcare without more information.
Here's another way to look at it. The death rate for automobile accidents in 2000 in the US was significantly higher than the death rate for automobile accidents in 1850. Does that imply that 1850 accident healthcare was better?
So, looking at our "overhead" it's easy to see why we get little benefit from the money spent.
