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The Myth of Americans' Poor Life Expectancy
From Avik Roy of Forbes. Excerpts:
"Measuring health outcomes at the point of intervention
If you really want to measure health outcomes, the best way to do it
is at the point of medical intervention. If you have a heart attack, how
long do you live in the U.S. vs. another country? If you’re diagnosed
with breast cancer? In 2008, a group of investigators conducted a
worldwide study of cancer survival rates, called CONCORD.
They looked at 5-year survival rates for breast cancer, colon and
rectal cancer, and prostate cancer. I compiled their data for the U.S.,
Canada, Australia, Japan, and western Europe. Guess who came out number
one?
U-S-A! U-S-A! What’s just as interesting is that Japan, the country that tops the overall life expectancy tables, finished in the middle of the pack on cancer survival.
Car accidents and homicides don’t tell us much about health care quality
Another
point worth making is that people die for other reasons than health.
For example, people die because of car accidents and violent crime. A
few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of
the University of Iowa asked the obvious question:
what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life
expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults
from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment,
drops from first to ninth.
It’s great that the Japanese eat more sushi than we do, and that they
settle their arguments more peaceably. But these things don’t have
anything to do with socialized medicine.
America doesn’t have one health care system, but three
Finally, U.S. life-expectancy statistics are skewed by the fact that
the U.S. doesn’t have one health-care system, but three: Medicaid,
Medicare, and private insurance. (A fourth, the Obamacare exchanges, is
supposed to go into effect in 2014.) As I have noted in the past, health outcomes for those on government-sponsored insurance are worse than for those on private insurance.
To my knowledge, no one has attempted to segregate U.S.
life-expectancy figures by insurance status. But based on the data we
have, it’s highly likely that those on private insurance have the best
life expectancy, with Medicare patients in the middle, and the uninsured
and Medicaid at the bottom.
If we look at Switzerland,
a country with private-sector, market-based universal coverage, we see
very good health outcomes data. Put another way: if we compared the life
expectancy of Americans on private insurance with that of
centrally-planned Europeans, I’d bet that the U.S. would come out on
top. And if that’s true, the argument that socialized medicine leads to
longer life evaporates.
UPDATE: A number of mathematically astute readers have asked why some countries have increased average
life expectancies once you take out fatal injuries. I asked Robert
Ohsfeldt about this, who responded that the adjustment factor was based
on fatal injury rates relative to the average. Hence, the
adjusted numbers shouldn’t be seen as hard numerical estimates of life
expectancy, but rather as a way of understanding the true relative
ranking of the various countries on life expectancy excluding fatal
injuries.
For further reading on the topic of life expectancy, here are some recommendations. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw discusses some of the confounding factors with life expectancy statistics, citing this NBER study
by June and Dave O’Neill comparing the U.S. and Canada. (Mankiw calls
the misuse of U.S. life expectancy stats “schlocky.”) Chicago economist
Gary Becker makes note of the CONCORD study in this blog post. In 2009, Sam Preston and Jessica Ho of the University of Pennsylvania published a lengthy analysis
of life expectancy statistics, concluding that “the low longevity
ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly
functioning health care system.”"
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