Terry Lorch
ryan cooper"In 2020, there were 24 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, about 2.5 times higher than the average for high-income countries." https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/us-still-has-the-worst-most-expensive-health-care-of-any-high-income-country/
what a mess we've made for ourselves https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022
Alon@ryanlcooper Re obesity, it's important to point out that the US near-ties Sweden and Singapore for lowest smoking prevalence in the first world, and has lower alcohol consumption than most other rich countries. The lifestyle factors in the US are pretty much a wash vs. most peer rich countries, and the life expectancy there is still shit.
@Alon yes, very true. but I do wonder about the US having some of the least movement among rich countries--sizable fraction of the population that barely walks a few hundred steps a day
stephen judkins@ryanlcooper @Alon I saw a galaxy brain take that health effects of smoking weren't nearly as bad if you factor in that most people gain a lot of weight when they stop smoking
@stephenjudkins @ryanlcooper Nope. Not only is that wrong, but also it's why, if you just plot death rates by BMI, it looks like being mildly overweight is good for you. You need to control for smoking to see the correlation between being overweight and poor health.
mtsw@Alon @stephenjudkins @ryanlcooper the "being mildly overweight is good for you" thing is like a statistical artifact of so many people with serious, chronic or terminal illnesses losing weight isn't it?
@mtsw @stephenjudkins @ryanlcooper Yeah, that's the other thing. So you need to control for smoking and also lag the death rate on past BMI, and when you do that, the healthiest BMI is 20-22.
@ryanlcooper Oh, yeah, the lifestyle factors coming from automobility are horrible. But they're why the US lags Singapore, not why it lags hellholes that reek of tobacco smoke like France. (Name-search me on Birdsite, I have a thread with comparative life expectancy by social class for the US and France. The US is exactly as bad as you would think.)
@Alon mainly down to health care, you reckon?
@ryanlcooper Yeah. And access, specifically - college grads have the same life expectancy in the US and France, and then high school dropouts have a gap of like 7 years.
@Alon I could see that. ha I'm a grad but I haven't gone in for a checkup since like 2016
@ryanlcooper I last did in 2021 for insurance and then my previous time was in like 2010, but healthy people who aren't getting pregnant don't really need to see a doctor. The issue is that if I do get sick, I can go to the hospital.
@ryanlcooper This is the Birdsite thread: https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1209872475334381568?t=HbxY5UVwXMPthPJBJvFePQ&s=19
@[email protected] (they/them) on X
1. Thread about life expectancy differences by class in the US, France, Britain, and Belgium. tl;dr: America sucks.
@Alon cripes!
Tim Ellis (he/him) DJDynamicNC@ryanlcooper I grew up in the States, now live in Canada, and the difference is incredible. Canada ain't perfect but the healthcare system is light years better for anyone who isn't a billionaire.
@ryanlcooper regarding the fourth bullet point, I wonder where the US ranks in terms of administrators per person-visits. Of course, other countries likely have no need for such a metric.
@terrylorch quite a lot! I recall 2015 numbers showing we have rather low utilization but spend 8 percent of health care dollars on admin, which is ~2-5x what peer nations do
Clinical Rawlsian@ryanlcooper Like so many other nurses, doctors, and healthcare workers, I think about this all the time. If the US were to scrap our current healthcare system, pick another OECD country at random, and just copy their system, we would save huge amounts of money and improve outcomes for almost everyone. It is not an easy task to design a healthcare system that is both as expensive and as terrible as America's.
@MadMadMadMadRN nobody could design a system this stupid even on purpose
@ryanlcooper Yeah, you're right. I probably should have said "perpetuate" instead of "design".
Joan McCarter@ryanlcooper And it's only going to get worse with abortion bans.