5 ms·

America is a rich death trap

27 points by luu 4y ago

junofan 4y ago
The author misses that most OECD countries game these statistics (eg decrease childhood mortality by requiring 3 breaths to issue birth certificate) in response to internal political pressures you just don’t see in the US.
- dsomers 4y ago
  Can you give evidence of a developed country where that’s the case? Because I grew up right on the Canadian/US border, I have family and friends on both sides. It’s really easy for me to see why Canadians live longer than Americans. Poor Canadians have access to preventive medicine in a way poor Americans don’t because of our universal healthcare system. This prevents a lot of illness that are easily to stop in early stages but hard to stop in late stages from killing people. But it’s a really common thing for Americans under the influence of their radical corporate propaganda to wave things like universal healthcare away and just say with no evidence that other countries are cheating with numbers. No need to disrupt the amazing profits of your corporate health providers just to do something silly like save the lives of poor people —- they should really have worked harder if they didn’t want to die of cancer anyways. You know what my lived truth is? Before Canada had more advanced health cards and systems for keeping patient records, it was a common thing in my city for poor Americans to try to defraud our health system just so they could get basic treatment. But yeah buddy, keep believing the lies that we’re just counting infant mortality differently.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    The article suggests that wealthier subsets of the populations live longer in other wealthy countries than America and wealthy Americans generally do have access to healthcare[1]. And immigrants to the US also live particularly long so maybe they are wealthy and get good healthcare or maybe there’s something else to it. The article also suggests some issues may be due to the way cities in the US are laid out which doesn’t really result from some kind of corporate propaganda or conspiracy, but then Canadian cities are quite similarly laid out. It seems like a pretty messy nuanced topic that can’t be reduced to single US policies. [1] perhaps their wealthy groups were eg 80%ile of the population by wealth and biased differently due to how people make money in different countries, or perhaps you need a smaller group for wealthy Americans to perform better, or perhaps they picked some dollar threshold so the American group was proportionally poorer or broader as America is richer in general. I don’t really know how that comparison was made though.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  This feels so immensely specific you might want to share where you even got this information from
- Barrin92 4y ago
  that sounds like just about the only thing on that list that you could imagine to be a statistical artifact rather than self-evidently true. You know what you just don't see in Japan, Korea or Europe? Anything else on that list. The rate of obesity, gun deaths, car accidents, entire regions ravaged by opioids and so on. In the entirety of England and Wales, that's 60 million people, the police has about 0-3 fatal shootings per year.
  - stop50 4y ago
    I have a hard time to remember when was the last school shooting. It must have been around 10 years ago. In the us my guess would be at maximum a month ago and that is an optimistic guess.
    - dan-robertson 4y ago
      Wasn’t it school summer holidays recently in the US? Surely that should make you change your prior.
      - mtrycz2 4y ago
        Acutally last was August 21[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)#2020s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
    Sure the UK doesn't have the freedom to arm and defend yourself but it also doesn't have freedom of speech or freedom of expression.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  So the majority of OECD countries is cheating at statistics except the US? Do you have the exceptional evidence to go along with such an exceptional claim?
  - jmeister 4y ago
    From a reputable demographer: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 "what's going on here is that the US is actually reporting "pregnancy related mortality," a formally separate concept, and that's why literally every international organization puts like 19 asterisks after the US data and says DO NOT COMPARE"
    - dan-robertson 4y ago
      This is an interesting link and the story seems plausible. I’m glad you commented it. It’s also not related to how child/adult mortality in general are calculated, or to other countries ‘lying’ anymore than if one country produced statistics for 18-30 year olds and another for 21-30 year olds: the data is just not directly comparable.
      - jmeister 4y ago
        Yes it’s much narrower in scope than GP’s sweeping claim, but the prior should be that there are general differences in data between US and EU owing to lack of universal IT systems and differing attitudes towards privacy.
- bigbacaloa 4y ago
  Nonsense.
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    It’s true though. This is literally actually true. Saying “nonsense” because you want America to be bad at things doesn’t make it so.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  That actually sounds fairly reasonable as a threshold of “this is a live birth”. I’m not going to spend hours debating in my head whether it should 1, 3, 5, or 0-with-other-criteria, but someone has to make that determination.
  - thayne 4y ago
    But if the US is using different criteria than other countries, then it isn't really fair to compare those numbers. It's not clear to me if the statistics in that paper used the same criteria for considering a birth to be a live birth in the US as in europe.
- yakak 4y ago
  It might be fair to say that statistics vary a bit on definitions, but mother mortality is defined by the UN and the difference is much more pronounced because of US "internal political pressures".
blackhaz 4y ago
Sorry for the off-topic - is this just me or scrolling does not work in Firefox on this page? Not with the keyboard nor with the mouse.
- stop50 4y ago
  Probably adblocker-blocker.
- morgunkorn 4y ago
  I couldn't scroll on iOS either, I thought it was because I declined the cookies. But I could read the article in Reader Mode
harwoodleon 4y ago
This is the actual result of a broken political system, riddled with misinformation and special interests. Profit over people. This mortality figure is a disgrace, especially with the longevity technology we now have in humanity.
thayne 4y ago
> Expanding the number of primary-care physicians would reduce the chances of treatable conditions, such as moderate hypertension, blooming into costly maladies, such as heart disease. By itself, I don't think that would solve the problem. I am afraid of going to the doctor for anything that isn't pretty serious because not only will it be expensive, I have no idea how expensive it will be. Sure, a trip to my GP might catch something early, but it is much more likely I'll end up paying hundreds of dollars just to be told there is nothing wrong. Having more general practitioners might maybe decrease price due to more competition, but probably not enough to make a significant difference with how the health care system is currently structured.
silisili 4y ago
The article gets the right answer, but doesn't seem to tie it all together. Depression/despair. There are very few happy, well adjusted people on opioids. Or obese. Exceptions exist, but both seem to root from incredible amounts of unhappiness and/or lack of purpose. I don't know the answer to the problem...taxing soda isn't it. We need to give people hope and opportunity, and not just smack their hands when they do something bad.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I'm not sure to what extent this applies to America vs. world, but deaths from despair (actually a technical term) can be helped by religion (the study considered any weekly religious services) to the tune of a 68% (in women) reduction [1]. In the journalism surrounding this study, I've seen health professionals say things like "if we could prescribe it as medicine, it would be the most revolutionary treatment in the last 100 years". I'd be morbidly curious to see scientists relate the decline in religious service attendance to the increase in deaths from despair. I'm a religious person, and I have definitely experienced the implied improvements in my outlooks on the basic concepts of "hope", "joy", and "purpose". [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2765488 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
  - drewbug01 4y ago
    I grew up in an extremely religious environment - utterly toxic, in fact. I’m a better and healthier person for leaving it. BUT: I still find myself missing it sometimes. What it boils down to (for me) is community - I miss having easy, abundant community. Religion tends to be a communal thing, and it’s not surprising to me that community yields health benefits. I don’t think America in particular has much in the way of non-religious community. I wish we did.
    - silisili 4y ago
      I think you hit the nail on the head. I think people on the whole are, consciously or not, lonely as hell. I had -some- community as a child, family and neighbors who all were at each other's house at any time. It's all gone for me today, and I find myself wishing for it and missing it. People seem more insular and isolated than ever.
roenxi 4y ago
The part of this article that I really appreciate is that it takes a political minefield where nobody knows what is going on and presents it as a mess of different effects, none with an identified main cause. And reasonably non-judgmentally. It is fascinating that the problems around health particular persist despite all the factions acknowledging that it is a disaster. The US partisans need to learn how to negotiate, they obviously aren't very good at it.
- atoav 4y ago
  What I as an European always found weird is the fact that this is a political minefield in the US. As if there are not enough nations that have shown how health care can be organized in a good way for the benefit of all, for decades, all while having thriving economies. It happened more than once to me that in online discussions an US-american told me a thing was "not possible" that I grew up with my whole life. I am not sure if I would've become a freelancer if I had to worry about my state just letting me die if things don't work out.
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    The best explanation I can come up with (as an American) is that a large portion of Americans are incapable of rational thought when it comes to healthcare policy. They've somehow been led to believe that their system is run by the "market" and that that no system could possibly function better. The fact that many other countries do better does not matter. I find it best to analyze these people as if they were religious zealots rather than rational thinkers.
    - bm3719 4y ago
      They're just misinformed. The US health care industry is among those most heavily enmeshed with government at all levels (regulation, gatekeeping employment, funding/subsidizing, etc.). Whether you think it's good or not, most everyone would agree that level of involvement would result in a heavy distortion from what the free market would provide on its own. One rhetorical approach might be to say that since this is already the case, let's acknowledge that reality, then decide whether to increase/decrease/alter that reality.
durnygbur 4y ago
Hey, but you can buy smartwatch monitoring your health for 1000 bucks... and there is abundance of "health" coaches and "healthy" diets. Doctors though? They would rather never touch or even see you. Only Bill, Jeff, Zuck and your other palls can afford their attention.
- atoav 4y ago
  Judging the US discourse on that topic the issue is, that many of you would rather self medicate and risk their own health before paying a penny that might go to the health of someone else. If you are in a society where a part would rather have it worse themselves than support a stranger, you will not be able to have the nice things.
  - durnygbur 4y ago
    Social systems and insurances operate on best effort and "help most needy" first. Every time I'm paying full price, full monthly contributions, and every time I'm placed at the end of the queue...
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  People buy smartwatches and go on diets in rich non-American countries too. I don’t really know what your point is though? It’s possible to have a hard time seeing doctors in wealthy countries with socialised healthcare (eg the current situation with the nhs in the U.K.) and it is patently that you need to be one of the richest ~10 Americans to see a doctor. I think a great deal of the American readers of this site will have ‘good’ health plans to the extent that they could reasonably easily see a generalist doctor at short notice.
imtringued 4y ago
There are obese people that go and get a heart bypass. The problem is that they will never stop going. One day they will get their second and third. This is very expensive for not much effectiveness.
mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/QRkI1 https://archive.ph/QRkI1

27 points by luu 4y ago

The author misses that most OECD countries game these statistics (eg decrease childhood mortality by requiring 3 breaths to issue birth certificate) in response to internal political pressures you just don’t see in the US.

dsomers 4y ago
Can you give evidence of a developed country where that’s the case? Because I grew up right on the Canadian/US border, I have family and friends on both sides. It’s really easy for me to see why Canadians live longer than Americans. Poor Canadians have access to preventive medicine in a way poor Americans don’t because of our universal healthcare system. This prevents a lot of illness that are easily to stop in early stages but hard to stop in late stages from killing people. But it’s a really common thing for Americans under the influence of their radical corporate propaganda to wave things like universal healthcare away and just say with no evidence that other countries are cheating with numbers. No need to disrupt the amazing profits of your corporate health providers just to do something silly like save the lives of poor people —- they should really have worked harder if they didn’t want to die of cancer anyways. You know what my lived truth is? Before Canada had more advanced health cards and systems for keeping patient records, it was a common thing in my city for poor Americans to try to defraud our health system just so they could get basic treatment. But yeah buddy, keep believing the lies that we’re just counting infant mortality differently.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  The article suggests that wealthier subsets of the populations live longer in other wealthy countries than America and wealthy Americans generally do have access to healthcare[1]. And immigrants to the US also live particularly long so maybe they are wealthy and get good healthcare or maybe there’s something else to it. The article also suggests some issues may be due to the way cities in the US are laid out which doesn’t really result from some kind of corporate propaganda or conspiracy, but then Canadian cities are quite similarly laid out. It seems like a pretty messy nuanced topic that can’t be reduced to single US policies. [1] perhaps their wealthy groups were eg 80%ile of the population by wealth and biased differently due to how people make money in different countries, or perhaps you need a smaller group for wealthy Americans to perform better, or perhaps they picked some dollar threshold so the American group was proportionally poorer or broader as America is richer in general. I don’t really know how that comparison was made though.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
This feels so immensely specific you might want to share where you even got this information from
Barrin92 4y ago
that sounds like just about the only thing on that list that you could imagine to be a statistical artifact rather than self-evidently true. You know what you just don't see in Japan, Korea or Europe? Anything else on that list. The rate of obesity, gun deaths, car accidents, entire regions ravaged by opioids and so on. In the entirety of England and Wales, that's 60 million people, the police has about 0-3 fatal shootings per year.
- stop50 4y ago
  I have a hard time to remember when was the last school shooting. It must have been around 10 years ago. In the us my guess would be at maximum a month ago and that is an optimistic guess.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Wasn’t it school summer holidays recently in the US? Surely that should make you change your prior.
    - mtrycz2 4y ago
      Acutally last was August 21[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)#2020s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  Sure the UK doesn't have the freedom to arm and defend yourself but it also doesn't have freedom of speech or freedom of expression.
vanderZwan 4y ago
So the majority of OECD countries is cheating at statistics except the US? Do you have the exceptional evidence to go along with such an exceptional claim?
- jmeister 4y ago
  From a reputable demographer: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 "what's going on here is that the US is actually reporting "pregnancy related mortality," a formally separate concept, and that's why literally every international organization puts like 19 asterisks after the US data and says DO NOT COMPARE"
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    This is an interesting link and the story seems plausible. I’m glad you commented it. It’s also not related to how child/adult mortality in general are calculated, or to other countries ‘lying’ anymore than if one country produced statistics for 18-30 year olds and another for 21-30 year olds: the data is just not directly comparable.
    - jmeister 4y ago
      Yes it’s much narrower in scope than GP’s sweeping claim, but the prior should be that there are general differences in data between US and EU owing to lack of universal IT systems and differing attitudes towards privacy.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Nonsense.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  It’s true though. This is literally actually true. Saying “nonsense” because you want America to be bad at things doesn’t make it so.
sokoloff 4y ago
That actually sounds fairly reasonable as a threshold of “this is a live birth”. I’m not going to spend hours debating in my head whether it should 1, 3, 5, or 0-with-other-criteria, but someone has to make that determination.
- thayne 4y ago
  But if the US is using different criteria than other countries, then it isn't really fair to compare those numbers. It's not clear to me if the statistics in that paper used the same criteria for considering a birth to be a live birth in the US as in europe.
yakak 4y ago
It might be fair to say that statistics vary a bit on definitions, but mother mortality is defined by the UN and the difference is much more pronounced because of US "internal political pressures".

blackhaz 4y ago

Sorry for the off-topic - is this just me or scrolling does not work in Firefox on this page? Not with the keyboard nor with the mouse.

stop50 4y ago
Probably adblocker-blocker.
morgunkorn 4y ago
I couldn't scroll on iOS either, I thought it was because I declined the cookies. But I could read the article in Reader Mode

harwoodleon 4y ago

This is the actual result of a broken political system, riddled with misinformation and special interests. Profit over people. This mortality figure is a disgrace, especially with the longevity technology we now have in humanity.

thayne 4y ago

> Expanding the number of primary-care physicians would reduce the chances of treatable conditions, such as moderate hypertension, blooming into costly maladies, such as heart disease. By itself, I don't think that would solve the problem. I am afraid of going to the doctor for anything that isn't pretty serious because not only will it be expensive, I have no idea how expensive it will be. Sure, a trip to my GP might catch something early, but it is much more likely I'll end up paying hundreds of dollars just to be told there is nothing wrong. Having more general practitioners might maybe decrease price due to more competition, but probably not enough to make a significant difference with how the health care system is currently structured.

silisili 4y ago

The article gets the right answer, but doesn't seem to tie it all together. Depression/despair. There are very few happy, well adjusted people on opioids. Or obese. Exceptions exist, but both seem to root from incredible amounts of unhappiness and/or lack of purpose. I don't know the answer to the problem...taxing soda isn't it. We need to give people hope and opportunity, and not just smack their hands when they do something bad.

comfypotato 4y ago
I'm not sure to what extent this applies to America vs. world, but deaths from despair (actually a technical term) can be helped by religion (the study considered any weekly religious services) to the tune of a 68% (in women) reduction [1]. In the journalism surrounding this study, I've seen health professionals say things like "if we could prescribe it as medicine, it would be the most revolutionary treatment in the last 100 years". I'd be morbidly curious to see scientists relate the decline in religious service attendance to the increase in deaths from despair. I'm a religious person, and I have definitely experienced the implied improvements in my outlooks on the basic concepts of "hope", "joy", and "purpose". [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2765488 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
- drewbug01 4y ago
  I grew up in an extremely religious environment - utterly toxic, in fact. I’m a better and healthier person for leaving it. BUT: I still find myself missing it sometimes. What it boils down to (for me) is community - I miss having easy, abundant community. Religion tends to be a communal thing, and it’s not surprising to me that community yields health benefits. I don’t think America in particular has much in the way of non-religious community. I wish we did.
  - silisili 4y ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head. I think people on the whole are, consciously or not, lonely as hell. I had -some- community as a child, family and neighbors who all were at each other's house at any time. It's all gone for me today, and I find myself wishing for it and missing it. People seem more insular and isolated than ever.

roenxi 4y ago

The part of this article that I really appreciate is that it takes a political minefield where nobody knows what is going on and presents it as a mess of different effects, none with an identified main cause. And reasonably non-judgmentally. It is fascinating that the problems around health particular persist despite all the factions acknowledging that it is a disaster. The US partisans need to learn how to negotiate, they obviously aren't very good at it.

atoav 4y ago
What I as an European always found weird is the fact that this is a political minefield in the US. As if there are not enough nations that have shown how health care can be organized in a good way for the benefit of all, for decades, all while having thriving economies. It happened more than once to me that in online discussions an US-american told me a thing was "not possible" that I grew up with my whole life. I am not sure if I would've become a freelancer if I had to worry about my state just letting me die if things don't work out.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  The best explanation I can come up with (as an American) is that a large portion of Americans are incapable of rational thought when it comes to healthcare policy. They've somehow been led to believe that their system is run by the "market" and that that no system could possibly function better. The fact that many other countries do better does not matter. I find it best to analyze these people as if they were religious zealots rather than rational thinkers.
  - bm3719 4y ago
    They're just misinformed. The US health care industry is among those most heavily enmeshed with government at all levels (regulation, gatekeeping employment, funding/subsidizing, etc.). Whether you think it's good or not, most everyone would agree that level of involvement would result in a heavy distortion from what the free market would provide on its own. One rhetorical approach might be to say that since this is already the case, let's acknowledge that reality, then decide whether to increase/decrease/alter that reality.

durnygbur 4y ago

Hey, but you can buy smartwatch monitoring your health for 1000 bucks... and there is abundance of "health" coaches and "healthy" diets. Doctors though? They would rather never touch or even see you. Only Bill, Jeff, Zuck and your other palls can afford their attention.

atoav 4y ago
Judging the US discourse on that topic the issue is, that many of you would rather self medicate and risk their own health before paying a penny that might go to the health of someone else. If you are in a society where a part would rather have it worse themselves than support a stranger, you will not be able to have the nice things.
- durnygbur 4y ago
  Social systems and insurances operate on best effort and "help most needy" first. Every time I'm paying full price, full monthly contributions, and every time I'm placed at the end of the queue...
dan-robertson 4y ago
People buy smartwatches and go on diets in rich non-American countries too. I don’t really know what your point is though? It’s possible to have a hard time seeing doctors in wealthy countries with socialised healthcare (eg the current situation with the nhs in the U.K.) and it is patently that you need to be one of the richest ~10 Americans to see a doctor. I think a great deal of the American readers of this site will have ‘good’ health plans to the extent that they could reasonably easily see a generalist doctor at short notice.

imtringued 4y ago

There are obese people that go and get a heart bypass. The problem is that they will never stop going. One day they will get their second and third. This is very expensive for not much effectiveness.

mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/QRkI1 https://archive.ph/QRkI1