I mean… there is a LOT broken with the healthcare system in the US that you all know. However, in the US -granted you have the dime- you can get the best care in the world. If you can pay for that. If you have been to a hospital in the UK and to one in the US… you will exactly know what I mean.
However, this specific graphic shows that there are likely other contributors for higher life-expectancy than only professional/paid healthcare. E.g. lifestyle aspects like dietary consideration (Italy, Japan…).
Does not mean, that there is no need to fix the System.
Actually Australia is pretty high up. High radiation (i.e. skin cancer), I dont expect a way better diet than in the US.
Sure, it is just not as one dimensional as this cherry picked graphic implies. Education is also a likely contributor.
The optimization would be : cost low, life expectancy at max… however… it is not that easy… ‚Let’s Just copy the system of Japan‘ just would not work… or maybe it would!
However, best healthcare will not help you if have a unhealthy lifestyle which is known to be a common issue in the US especially. Not sure how it is about Australia though!
UK hospitals have been excellent in my experience, though I’ve obviously only seen some of them.
Plus, although our system is very different from America in theory, our government has, for decades (especially under the Conservative Party), been undermining the NHS through cuts, market-based policy decisions and creeping attempts at privatisation.
If the NHS was supported the way it deserves to be, it would be even better than it already is.
NHS underfunding is notorious. Not sure how situation has developed but I have seen quite some hospitals in the UK until 2016… Cannot really imagine it developed to the better. All the worst compared to continental Europe. And the few ones I saw in the US where excellent too. Of course some are exceptional in the UK. Not sure how situation has changed since 2016 though.
Fair points. And, of course, I’ve never been in a US hospital, so they may be like Xanadu in comparison :-)
If you want more fun info: if you move abroad you still owe Medicare & Medicaid, the national healthcare plan. Neither of these can you get an tax exemption, reimbursement, or a voucher to use in another country even if you haven’t stepped foot on US territory in decades. You will pay into these services your whole life if you have a passport to that shitty system & never get anything in return unless you fly to the US to have a procedure that will cost more than it does in the country you might be living in (even without insurance).
During COVID when Sleepy Joe Biden promised vaccines for all Americans that want vaccines, the health minister had to step in when asked to clarify that historically the US does not help its citizens abroad & to go ask the host country instead–or to get on a plane, in a pandemic, quarantining both ways, if you want a shot. The cherry on top was sending vaccines aboard for political favors & if you asked if the embassy if any of those will be used for citizens abroad to be told these were for diplomatic purposes only (meanwhile France & China sent its citizens shots).
This makes complete sense as getting you to pay more for less is what private businesses are all about.
Cool, can the stupid meme “security is why the US has no free healthcare” finally die?
Only if you keep reminding people that Medicare for All would be cheaper than our current system.
Well, now I’d like to learn what the differences between the US and the Australian Healthcare System are!
Why is Australia so damn high up?
Turns out it seems the Australians have public health insurance for everyone - Medicare. And you have optional additional private insurance. Communism I guess. Surely wouldn’t workout for the US…
Turns out it seems the Australians have public health insurance for everyone - Medicare.
To follow from your comment , because Australia has a publicly funded health system, the government actively works to reduce preventable diseases because it reduces the load on the system.
So they have had:
A sunscreen campaign and skin cancer check initiatives since the '80s.
Anti-smoking campaigns (and high tobacco taxes) where resources are available to help quit.
Every citizen gets a free bowel cancer test mailed to them when they turn 50 to help find and treat cancer earlier.
Road safety laws are tight and helmet / seatbelt regulations are strict as it reduces hospital loads.
Vaccinations for a multitude of easily preventable diseases are given for free in childhood, particularly now for the virus that causes cervical cancer.
Those and a myriad of other public health initiatives all help Australians to live longer.
Coupled with the fact that the cost for the whole population is borne by an income tax of approximately 2% , it means that if you are poor or unemployed, you still have access to health services. That also means that small health issues among low income earners don’t snowball until they are life threatening.
It has the knock on effect that people don’t end up trapped in a job because it offers “good benefits and a low deductible” and concerns about pre existing conditions interfering with insurance and etc when changing jobs is generally moot.
Then throw in mandatory government regulated retirement funds that require all employers to put in 12+ percent of an employee’s gross earnings into an employee’s fund of their choosing for their retirement. That coupled with public health generally means the whole US style worker=slave arrangement can’t exist.
Which means the US will get nothing like this as all that screams of nanny state overlords and death panels and moar taxes killing freedom and so on and so forth. Sorry guys.
TY! It really wasn’t on my screen… Think I‘ll dive deeper into this. Thanks again for the effort!
The market will solve it, Germany is an example. But there’s no free market in US healthcare, that’s the issue.
Hell no where did you get that from?
From facts. German healthcare system is 100% privatised and it works very well due to minimal market regulations, but extensive safety regulation. The US healthcare system is bound to insane licensing processes and fees, yet close to zero safety regulations.
For example, the US only has a few medical air transport companies, because getting a license is very very expensive. Only big corps can afford it and they have a cartel like grip on the market as there’s no competition. At the same time the US doesn’t regulate their performance and pricing. So you end up with an artificial cartel monopoly which sets sky high prices for their services.
Similar licensing in Germany is much cheaper and any decent air company can afford it, so there’s a lot of healthy competition. But they also have price caps, so services are actually affordable.
So, in short the difference is that Germany has a free market with pro-consumer regulations and the US has cartel monopoly without any pro-consumer regulations at all. And this approach goes through the whole healthcare system.
The free market always sorts itself out, especially with a small nudge from the state, that’s why US corporations are lobbying hard to prevent all and any competition to themselves. And that’s why corporate lobbying is called corruption elsewhere and is illegal.
I mean the US healthcare market has huge amounts of regulatory and liceance capture that makes for free market healthcare impossible in the states. Its also, because of this subsidized a lot but practically forbidden to be efficient (because most of the industry is ran by for profit).
Kind of worst case of government stepping in only to prevent meaningful markets but not to support people in need (not to say Medicare and medicaid don’t help some, they are the better example IMHO even if they pay out so bad most places practically refuse to take it).
This is big scale capitalism, not free market.
Capitalism is the key problem.
A free market is probably necessary. With a system where everyone has enough to live well, affordable healthcare, equal treatment etc.
A free market ensures a lot of quality standards.
But it is not only competition, improvements and “getting the best, the best way”.
It is “making & selling something that people buy, the cheap way”. This principle is fundamentally flawed, as environmental protection doesnt pay, and there is no real reason for companies to be good for the enviroment. Like, actually being good.
You can also argue that products enshittified over time (glued together laptops, unnecessarily weak drinking glasses, “IOT-ifying” everything, cheap clothes, throwaway razors, cheap food,…) because there is no value in making good products in a free market, if people get f**ing brainwashed and dont buy stuff based on their value over time.
And equally it is even worse with the environment. As there is no value in protecting the environment, nobody does it. Now laws force companies to list all important data, and this gets converted into some indirect form of money. But not nearly as transparently and freely as a free market. You may get fees or not, you may save some “carbon credits” but these are horrendously underpriced and can be bought with neocolonial freakshows like forcing people out of their own land, to “protect it”, as if it would have been destroyed before.
And the main flaw is that there is no big reason to not fake these values. Or not just write down what you already do, and keep it at this. Or do more than needed.
And to the topic, a free market has no stop sign. Companies naturally grow bigger and bigger, get more and more efficient, critical for whole societies that rely on working for them, and thus they are inherently not “neutral possibilities in a free world”.
This always leads to huge mega-giants having influence on people, politics etc.
And this leads us to the situation we are currently in. Companies abusing license and patent laws, to cripple the system that even made them possible.
I have no idea why the US is so f**cked up in this graph, but believe me Germany is also horrible.
Trickle down economics does work in a way that ensures basic healthcare for all germans. But meanwhile these damn germans produce a SH**LOAD of stuff.
I have no numbers but it is insane how much utter garbage we produce. And from this endless, insane stream of trash, we always scoop off enough profit to make the 1% even more ugly rich, and keep the said basic human rights intact.
This may work, but it is soooo far from sufficiency.
I really liked the latest video of “Second Thought”, about the american dream and capitalisms natural path to fascism
You have to have a will to live, also.
…how did the line come about? How did they determine what the life expectancy would have been with less expenditure per capita?
My guess is that the line tracks what the life expectancy was when the expenditure per capita was that much? Might have to dig into their source to get more details.
At least one of those lines goes back on itself at some point, so my assumption is that it’s tracking where each country has been over time.
Ooh good catch. That makes sense. Not sure I would call this beautiful, especially without any way to tell how much time has passed, but fair enough
I think the line might be historical data?
But… from when? Surely expenditure hasn’t gone up linearly with time
Yeah something is weird about this graph.
Health expense in what timeframe? Monthly, yearly?
If i had to guess, i would say this graph just shows the average yearly health expense of people that died at age X
So people that spend more money on their health, live longer. If thats the whole message this is the most boring graph ever.
If the US line is true, it shows that people there get much less value out of the money they spend on their health.
There is a minimum amount which is likely the least some people spent on their health. So there is no interpolation I can see.
That doesn’t make sense unless this was personal expenditure, which it doesn’t seem to be
My guess is that this was a gif at some point and the line is historical data
Definitely, you can see some lines in the top left zigzagging back left, which would not be possible if each was a function of the x-axis. In fact, both axes are a function of the hidden z-axis, which is time and comes in discrete yearly steps, the latest of which (2021) is highlighted.
The good news is that if you live in America, living part 80 is a terrible experience that nobody would want to do anyways.
I think it’s clear from the graph that USA is doing it right and the rest of the world needs to smarten up!
/s
We can do better. There’s still empty pixels on the right to fill.
Wait the life expectancy in the US is that low?!
It’s actually lower in the poor-er regions.
I’m guessing the target goal is whatever they set retirement age to be.
(Yes, I realize they want to eliminate retirement entirely.)
Absolutely. They’ve been trying to increase the retirement age for years now.
That’s average. So if you have a lot of money and are spending it to raise the average cost, you probably live as long or longer than the other countries. On the other hand, the poors have a live expectancy that much lower to average it out. So call it 70 for the poors and 82 for the rich.
I N N O V A T I O N Doctors in the US spend about 25% of their time dealing with insurance companies
That seems low
My doctor has added a few extra checks to visits so it can be billed to the insurance company as a general checkup, and not the specific thing I came in for that would bill at a much higher rate. I appreciate him doing that, but he shouldn’t have to.
In Germany the adminstrative effort including documentation is at 50%.
It’s pretty disconcerting that we’re the second worst after the US.
Sure. But the graphic is very much cherry picked. There is plenty of space between the US and Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
What surprises me is the high rank of Australia!
- Infrastructure in Australia is unfavorable… like the US (thin emc network vs. helicopters in Germany that are super common, Germany is a dense country, everywhere hospitals… Australia a desert with some coast. Like US.)
- Australians are basically US americans of the south (think food: originally british, cannot be healthy, no good car manufacturers, afraid of foreigners…)
- Everything is trying to kill you in Australia!
What the heck are they doing?
But maybe the Germans can learn from the Australians something. Germany‘s System is such a inefficient mess… just the administrative effort to maintain dozens of public health care insurances… crazy!
To add to @[email protected] 's points, Australia isn’t afraid of foreigners, it has very high migration. You might be confused because of the government’s reprehensible treatment of asylum seekers. Yes it was colonised by England, but internally, diversity is the most celebrated aspect of Australia.
Australia has been dubbed ‘the lucky country’ because despite a lack of smarts (manufacturing and other value added economic activity), we’ve always been able to dig things out of the ground and sell it (coal, wood, gas, food, gold…). Though Australia never developed a serious manufacturing sector, it has pivoted to a service economy instead, with that sector’s highest export being higher education.
The lessons to learn from Australia is be rich, be on the other side of the world away from the world wars, and have high welfare spending (plenty of room for improvement though).
I don’t know about much diversity is celebrated in Australia. I have cousins who grew up in NSW and eventually migrated to the UK, which they said had a marketed improvement in how they were treated. (N=2)
I don’t understand the points of this post.
Australia is very urbanised with the vast majority of the country clinging to the coastal rim. The interior of the country is vastly unpopulated.
Australia has a much better health outcomes than the US. Our fast food culture, although not great, cannot be compared to Americans.
The ‘everything can kill you’ thing is a meme. Yes, we have tons of venomous creatures but as we mostly live in the cities the rare deaths cause headlines and are not common place. Plus we don’t experience mass shootings every week, let alone single gun deaths.
The single biggest benefit for Australian life expectancy is socialised medicine. It’s not perfect, and insurance is encouraged, but a poor person in need of major medical intervention has almost identical access to health care as a fully insured person, and mostly with no financial outlay. In fact, an insured person may lie side-by-side in a hospital bed next to an uninsured person getting the same treatment.
Medical insurance is not tied to employment.
All this is under threat. Conservatives are attacking our health system and underfunding it. It is only a matter of time before we start tracking downwards like the US. The secret to a longer life expectancy is government regulation and social responsibility, a healthy personal lifestyle and not feeding the corporate medical parasites that sit between the patient and the required healthcare.
Point is, Australia pays less and gets more. while being -culturally- a “western” country (unlike Japan). Somewhat similar in many ways to Germany and the US.
Being a rich country seems not to be the only reason for high life expectancy. See comparatively low scores of Germany and the US. And to me it is puzzling how Australia, of all countries, ended so far at the top.
Public healthcare is available in Germany too… and on a small scale, basically in the US now too… Still, both suck hard and Australia excels. Tied insurance to a job is utmost stupid and unfair. Point well taken! Good job Australia! But this is the same in Germany.
@[email protected] did a great job explaining some aspects!
Thanks for the effort. Not everything tries to kill you Australians either in reality? Was just playing around with some cliches… to underscore that I know nothing about Australia. The term ‘fast food culture’ is awesome. And surely you are able to compare pears with apples.
‘Government Regulation’ alone seems not be too important here, as all compared countries have many regulations in place. Especially also the US with their FDA. Typically, for the good, regulations increase cost for something to achieve something. Here ‘Drug and medical device safety’. And that public healthcare is a requirement is agreed upon by all of us. But these are not all aspects.
And for some reason Japanese are even better, even if they spend lives working all day while eating raw fish… don’t tell me now that this is not the entire truth either! (Having a healthy fast food culture eating sushi may help them too!)
Any good example for a corporate medical parasite? I’d like to dig deeper. I mean, do you mean ‘Pharma-Industry’ or Health Care insurance here? Any specific case? In Germany public health insurance is not really ‘evil’ it is just a huge bulky inefficient mess… And US Pfizer is of course a big corporation making billions. But they also brought us a pretty good COVID vaccine, pretty fast (with the help of a small company in Germany). IMHO Billions well deserved - in this single case.
Australians are basically US americans of the south (think food: originally british, cannot be healthy, no good car manufacturers, afraid of foreigners…)
They’re really more like Canadians than Americans, although I’ve heard it said that New Zealand more accurately fills that role
Is this a good comparison? Feels like we’re missing all of the US administration, insurance is just a part of it.
Barely, but doctors here in Germany are always complaining about difficulties they have with insurances. Especially the dozens of different public insurances. System here is an unconsolidated mess. Apart from having optional private insurance.
Like my doctor working on treatment and not being buried with administrative tasks.
Yeah, but think of all that value generated for shareholders in America: What’s a few million dead people compared to profit?
That, and half of the system is designed to discard people that are no long useful for the machine, unless of course they’re wealthy or have a wealthy benefactor.
Abolish private health insurance corporations. The middlemen are bleeding us fuckin dry.
The best part is that it’s only State spendings, people in the USA also pay for private insurance individually!
Americans essentially pay for our insurance 4 times.
we pay more tax dollars per patient than ay other country
We pay hundreds per person per month in insurance premiums
We pay all healthcare expenses until we hit our annual deductible
We they pay a co-pay percentage after all treatment beyond the deductible.
Everyone knows it’s a broken system, but people are adamant that anything else would be communism or would make you lose an election.
The people worried about “losing an election” are paid by the people who profit from the broken system. The communism fear is a strawman that liberals use to excuse their worthless party.
