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15 years if you don't separate out by county. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/06/us-healthcare-wealth-income-inequality-lifespan https://www.thegu

15 years if you don't separate out by county. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/06/us-healthcare-wealth-income-inequality-lifespan https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/06/us-healthcar.... Even if you stick with the article I linked above, living in a poor part of the US takes 20 years off your life expectancy, which is still my point. The US can and does restrict the poor from access to resources that will add decades to their lives.

SamReidHughes 8y ago
The U.S. doesn't restrict the poor from access to anything, besides illegal drugs. We can already tell from the Oregon health care experiment that access to Medicaid doesn't really matter the way you'd be expecting. What drives life expectancy gaps is what you put in your body, what you do with your body, and, especially with the bottom 1%, causation in the other direction, which is the effect of bad health on your income. It's literally impossible for a healthy person to be in the bottom 1% by income unless they choose not to work. So you're comparing regular rich people to a set of people that pretty much by definition have major substance abuse and health problems. If other countries have better stats in this regard it's because they've less opportunity for functional people to pull themselves out of the bottom 1%.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  There’s no functional difference between “you can’t have this” and “this is too expensive for you”. Neither affects my original point in the slightest. “The poor do it to themselves” is an argument that you can take back to the Victorian era where it belongs.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    In the terms of drinking, smoking, and obesity, they in fact do. That's the real world you live in. We already do have healthcare programs for the bottom 1%, like Medicaid. A better analysis would be to compare the overall population variance in life span, between different countries or years. This gives a direct measurement of how unequal life outcomes are, instead of being affected by the way the economy sorts people into wealth brackets.

SamReidHughes 8y ago

The U.S. doesn't restrict the poor from access to anything, besides illegal drugs. We can already tell from the Oregon health care experiment that access to Medicaid doesn't really matter the way you'd be expecting. What drives life expectancy gaps is what you put in your body, what you do with your body, and, especially with the bottom 1%, causation in the other direction, which is the effect of bad health on your income. It's literally impossible for a healthy person to be in the bottom 1% by income unless they choose not to work. So you're comparing regular rich people to a set of people that pretty much by definition have major substance abuse and health problems. If other countries have better stats in this regard it's because they've less opportunity for functional people to pull themselves out of the bottom 1%.

village-idiot 8y ago
There’s no functional difference between “you can’t have this” and “this is too expensive for you”. Neither affects my original point in the slightest. “The poor do it to themselves” is an argument that you can take back to the Victorian era where it belongs.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  In the terms of drinking, smoking, and obesity, they in fact do. That's the real world you live in. We already do have healthcare programs for the bottom 1%, like Medicaid. A better analysis would be to compare the overall population variance in life span, between different countries or years. This gives a direct measurement of how unequal life outcomes are, instead of being affected by the way the economy sorts people into wealth brackets.