> 1) Using average income, a clearly bad statistic, can't be justified by saying you could not find a good statistic. Unless you use a good statistic, your argu

> 1) Using average income, a clearly bad statistic, can't be justified by saying you could not find a good statistic. Unless you use a good statistic, your argument isn't justified. (cue story of drunk looking for glasses under lamp post etc). You're not responding to the complete argument. RCA has looked into finding median measure of income, and not found them relevant to the discussion because (as he says in the third point of the argument) the rich do subsidize health care for the poor. > Also, if there's no measured difference in individual household income versus health care spending, well then maybe his pet theory comparing average household income and health care spending isn't very applicable either. But again, mean income is relevant because the important thing is how much a society as a whole puts into the healthcare system. Average is meaningful when the rich subsidize the poor. > 2) "RCA is saying that, as a country, the U.S. spends more on healthcare because we consume more health care than other countries." > That argument is either wrong or tautological. The US spends more on health care for worse outcomes, as many studies have shown. If this person means we buy better outcomes, they are wrong. If they are saying we buy more stuff labeled health care, maybe true but that's because the system is bad, not good. According to RCA, AIC isn't just correlated with spending, but also "the vast majority of socially relevant outcomes and their covariates." [1] [1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything-you-know-about-healthcare-is-wrong-in-one-million-charts-a-response-to-noah-smith/#rcatoc-these-measures-are-also-superior-predictors-of-just-about-every-socially-relevant-metric https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything... EDIT: fixed wording in my first response ADDENDUM: There are charts that show life expectancy to be lower in the U.S. than other developed countries, but that has to do with factors other than the quality of healthcare[2]. [2]https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2016/11/06/us-life-expectancy-is-below-naive-expectations-mostly-because-it-economically-outperforms/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2016/11/06/us-life-expect...