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Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index – 2019 edition
- JaumeGreen 8y ago> "Primary care is essentially provided by public providers, specialized family doctors and staff nurses, who provide preventive services to children, women and elderly patients, and acute and chronic care," The public healthcare here in Spain has an endemic problem of ever reducing budgets, and it's so saturated (because of that) that most people that can also get private healthcare. When politicians touch that is to reduce the budget even further. Yet people think that the main problems in Spain are other things... damn the propaganda machine.
- nairboon 8y agoSo what are the main problems in Spain, according to what most people think? (I'm not very familiar with Spain)
- adrinavarro 8y agoNational politics (Catalonia, etc). But there's also an endemic issue with spending on unnecessary infrastructure while underfunding heavily used infrastructure (such as public transportation in large cities); our budgets never seem to be able to reduce debt, and our pension system is doomed to explode, because eventually there will be more retired than working people.
- collyw 8y agoGiven that the life expectancy is so high maybe it makes sense to raise the retirement age here by a few years more.
- manuelflara 8y agoSadly, the political landscape has been pretty much monopolized by the Catalonian independence issue, with politicians using it as a smoke screen to cover way more important issues like constant corruption scandals, rampant privatization of health care, double-digit yearly increases in utility bills, housing rent bubble, etc.
- manuelflara 8y agoIndeed, the public healthcare system in Spain, while still great compared to most of the world, is a shadow of what it once was, with the rampant privatization done by the Government in the last decade. A really sad situation. That being said, decent private healthcare here is about 100€/month, so while private healthcare is still considered "a luxury" (because public one is pretty good), it's still very very far from the cost of US private healthcare.
- antr 8y agoRampant privatization? Spain's public healthcare expenditure[1] was: 38.552 €bn in 2002, and 66.678 €bn in 2016 (latest official year), this is a 73% increase in 14 years. On other hand while population was 41.31 m in 2002, and 46.48 m in 2016, A 13% increase. This is a 53% net increase in expenditure per capita. I'm curious to know what "rampant privatization" to you means, as government/public expenditure has by no means slowed down, quite the contrary. In my opinion, healthcare expenditure is out of control. But that is a completely different debate. [1] http://www.mscbs.gob.es/en/estadEstudios/estadisticas/inforRecopilaciones/gastoSanitario2005/home.htm http://www.mscbs.gob.es/en/estadEstudios/estadisticas/inforR...
- dagw 8y agoI'm curious to know what "rampant privatization" to you means, as government/public expenditure has by no means slowed down, quite the contrary. I don't know about Spain, but at least in Sweden there's an argument that the increase in privatization in the health care sector has resulted in higher costs (and thus higher government expenditure) without matching improvement in heath care outcomes.
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- pjc50 8y agoAre those numbers inflation-adjusted? Raw expenditure tells us nothing about whether or not it has been privatised, too. Often the privatised services are more expensive - after all, they have to pay dividends.
- melenaboija 8y agoSpanish healthcare is among the best in the world despite the problems. Also, quite bold calling propaganda a report from United Nations analyzing population health. What do other problems the country has have to do with the people health? Maybe your comment contains some propaganda too.
- JaumeGreen 8y agoI think you misundertood my comment. Propaganda is what is done in Spain to make people look at fake problems instead of the real ones. I don't think this report is propaganda.
- melenaboija 8y agoI know you are not saying the report is propaganda, but I understand you mean appearing in media is. What I am saying is that besides the intention of the article (which is Bloomberg giving UN results) these are facts. Seeing this facts stated might help others and it does not mean stop fighting for other causes in the country.
- JaumeGreen 8y ago> I know you are not saying the report is propaganda, but I understand you mean appearing in media is. No, I do not mean what you are saying. I was talking about what is on the newspapers these days on here: * Catalonia * Next general elections (on April) * "Minor" cases of corruption (relative to others in either money amount or the person affected) * Football (Soccer for the people from USA) * Venezuela * "Famous" people (only famous because they appear on media as "famous") * Bad migrants * Memes What is not talked about is: * Mayor cases of corruption * Dismantling of the public sector (before it was in big steps, now it is in small ones) * Housing bubble (again) * Low salaries * Bad support to small entreperneurs * The reasons why there are more migrants and what to do
- melenaboija 8y agoI'm sorry. I keep seeing much more political intention in your comments than the article per se.
- bostonpete 8y agoWow, that's surprising to me because of smoking alone. When I lived there briefly in the early 90s, it seemed like everyone smoked. I wonder if that's changed dramatically or is just drowned out by other metrics...
- manuelflara 8y agoI'm Spanish and live here and I'd say people smoke a lot less than they used to after laws were passed a few years ago banning smoking from pretty much any indoor space that isn't residential. I know few people who smoke and those who do don't smoke _a lot_. French people on the other hand, pretty much every person I know, even here living in Barcelona, smokes like crazy.
- WhiteSage 8y agoIt did change! In fact now smoking is prohibited near schools and inside bars and clubs. Some people smoke, but not almost everybody as before.
- nkozyra 8y agoI remember people smoking everywhere in the US, too, though. In fact, moving to NYC I was struck by how I still saw people smoking because of how infrequent it was elsewhere
- lordnacho 8y agoThis seems to have massively changed all over Europe. When I was a kid in the 90s you could go into bars that were foggy with smoke. TV characters would do it. Nowadays it's generally not cool anymore, it's seen as a vice and people will sdmit so when they ask if it's okay.
- close04 8y agoThe laws changed and smoking inside public spaces was all but abolished. There are still holdouts in the countries that passed these laws more recently but the trend is clear and it's acceleration. I also noticed that one big factor that actually worked in discouraging teens from even starting is the "uncool" image built around smoking. Unfortunately it look like the coolness factor is moving to electronic cigarettes and there's not much data to discourage the use yet.
- samat 8y agoLove how 'click HERE' is not a link. > To access the Bloomberg 2019 Healthiest Country Index data set for all nations, click HERE.
- olcor 8y agoThe article seems to have been taken from the main Bloomberg site: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-24/spain-tops-italy-as-world-s-healthiest-nation-while-u-s-slips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-24/spain-top... The "click here" link is for terminal subscribers only so I guess Quint might not have been able to resolve it properly.
- yogeshlor 8y agoPlus the browser back button is hacked. Can't comeback to hacker news
- eyebrowser95 8y agoI think Bloomberg did an oopsie..
- lettergram 8y agoThere’s something wrong with the methodology here when Cuba is ranked higher than the US. People are starving in Cuba, with no health care...
- lultimouomo 8y agoWhy do you assume the problem is with the methodology of the study? Cuba has a longer life expectancy than US. As a European, I'd say there's something wrong with US approach to health: people living under a dictatorship in a poor country have better health than Americans.
- lettergram 8y agoI’d love to see real stats on that. All I ever see is the statement that there’s this huge problem in the US. Yet, when I travel I see tons of people without teeth, starving in the street, etc. It’s anecdotal, but I cannot imagine these countries are equivalent. I’ve even seen the claim healthcare is super good outside the United stares. Although it costs more, the US had a top notch system for medical care. They can see a doctor in minutes, get open heart surgery, and go home for <$8000 within a week, with a high chance of survival. The only requirement is insurance, which the vast majority of people have. It’s the insurance part that gets people upset, the health care is not. Further, Longer life expectancy means little by itself doesn’t mean much. What if a group is predisposed to disease via their genetics? Is that country not counting deaths of children, are the mothers less likely to carry to term, etc? Even if you controlled for everything, you’d also need good records are kept (something I doubt on Cuba). My point is a lot of time this data is so fuzzy, it’s meaningless. Give me 100 stats and I can mess with the weights until Spain is #1 or #50 easily in healthcare. There needs to be lots of care to make solid claims and I don’t think that was done here, I think they wanted viewership.
- RobertoG 8y agoMaybe the Cubans and the Spaniards have some magic genes on them, but I think is more probably that you vision of those countries is distorted. Personally, and this is my intuition talking, I think that the most important fact is primary care. If you need open heart surgery you probably would be better (marginally) in the States than Cube (assuming you can afford it), but what really makes a difference is to get diagnosed in the early states of a illness or, for old people, constant follow up by a doctor. Interesting, it seems that both Italy and Spain have primary care totally public, that means, the doctors work for the National Health System. It would be interesting to check if this the case for the other top countries in the list.
- jug 8y agoWow. Russia looks worse off than I thought. Congrats, you share Egyptian health standards.
- fedups 8y agoI'd be curious how individual US states stack up here--it seems like there would be quite a bit of variance (and I'm sure the US isn't the only country whose stats become much less informative when aggregated to a single number).
- thinkcontext 8y agohttps://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2017-annual-report/findings-state-rankings https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2017-an...