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I dislike how often I see justifications for the sources of inadequacies of current systems supposedly shown by comparing different countries to the US. An exa
by ve55 7y ago
I dislike how often I see justifications for the sources of inadequacies of current systems supposedly shown by comparing different countries to the US.
An example of this in the paper is when they state that the US has more expensive healthcare, but yet worse metrics such as life expectancy. As the differences in healthcare systems between the US and these other comparison countries are obvious, they want to clearly imply causation here. But, when comparing one country to another country, you are changing so many variables at once that it doesn't allow you to conclude the source or causality of these differences. They may still be partially right, but it is nowhere near proven.
While the US does have more expensive health care, it also has higher real incomes, which seem to correlate strongly with this (see the first two images on https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...).
While the US does have a worse life expectancy than many 'comparable' countries, it also has significantly worse problems of obesity and drug overdoses, which when controlled for eliminate a large amount of the discrepancy.
Some parts of the paper are definitely reasonable and generally agreed-upon, but it's quite clear they had a specific goal and political call-to-action set in their minds when writing it.
- zanny 7y ago> has significantly worse problems of obesity and drug overdoses Which can easily be caused by a destructive and broken healthcare system leaving the ill unable to seek treatment and thus left to fend for themselves. Even for those with insurance the costs - in time, in bureaucracy, in often money when your insurance provider refuses to cover - are unreasonable to consider seeing a doctor in a thousandfold situations that Europeans never even second guess. Because they don't need a waist deep paper trail to go to their physician, because they won't get a dozen different bill collectors harassing them in every legally gray way possible, because they don't need to break out the checkbook on the way out to pay the minimum barrier to entry extortion at the end.
- ve55 7y agoThe reason I disagree with this is because our healthcare system is largely built upon treating someone after they have an apparent issue, instead of preventing the issue. It seems very difficult for a healthcare system to stop someone from becoming obese to begin with, or stop someone from abusing drugs that is intent on it and not seeing anyone intentionally, or stop problems like depression by their root cause instead of attempting to fix all of these things afterwards. I'd be surprised if you really think a healthcare system by itself could be powerful enough to stop obesity.
- narag 7y agoActually it happens. You go to the doctor with some side effect, like headaches or high blood pressure and they nudge you to go to the dietist. Of course you can refuse, but there are a lot of kind and caring professionals and you know it won't cost you money, so it works sometimes.
- ve55 7y agoRight, but the keyword there is 'nudge'. If you are already having headaches and high blood pressure due to your diet, your diet should have been modified long ago. Similarly when people have cardiovascular issues and atherosclerosis, the time to change things was likely decades ago, not after they've already damaged their body so much. Sometimes these 'nudges' help patients, but getting someone to significantly alter their life is very hard.
- narag 7y agoStill there are much less obesity over here.