United States Ranks 50th in Life Expectancy
Related subjects: Health Science, Healthcare Policy, Legislation, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, U.S. news Comments (1)
Life expectancy in the United States is 78.11 years, 50th in the world, behind the Wallis and Futuna Islands and just ahead of Guadeloupe. Canada is 8th, at 81.23 years; France is 9th, at 80.98; Sweden is 10th, at 80.86. Despite Canada’s “socialized” healthcare system, the average Canadian can expect to live more than three years longer than the average American.
Life expectancy is often cited as one of the prime measures of the degree of “success” or achievement of a healthcare market. While certain elements in the US political sphere continue to rant about the disaster of government “intervention” in medical insurance, life expectancy seems to indicate that healthcare systems where coverage extends to all but government does not interfere with treatment decisions, enjoy a higher life expectancy.
In the United States, a major contributing factor to the lower age for average life expectancy is the lack of access to care that affects tens of millions of people who cannot obtain sufficient health insurance coverage. Whether reforms currently under consideration would solve that problem is a matter of ongoing debate, but the reforms’ backers consistently affirm they are aimed at achieving that goal.
For the few Americans who both have the resources to cover all the costs of healthcare plans available to them or to which they are limited through denial of access standards, the system may provide a better likelihood of long life. But for the 52 million with no coverage, and the tens of millions more with insufficient coverage or whose costs are unsustainable given their personal or family income, the status quo means private health insurance often limits access to care and prevents patients from obtaining sustained preventative care.
In fact, of the industrialized democracies with some form of guaranteed universal coverage, every one of them is ahead of the United States in the ranking of overall average life expectancy. Japan is 3rd in the world, at 82.12 years; Australia ranks 7th, at 81.63 years; Switzerland ranks 11th, at 80.85 years, using a unique fully private insurance model where the government organizes and mandates standards for coverage.
Israel, whose system is also universal, mandatory and government organized, ranks 13th in the world, with life expectancy of 80.73 years. Iceland, whose universal healthcare system spends less per person than the US government already does, ranks 14th, at 80.67 years. Italy ranks 19th, at 80.2 years; Spain ranks 23rd, at 80.05; Norway ranks 24th, at 79.95.
Even the United Kingdom, whose universal government funded and managed National Health Service (NHS) does notoriously ration care and calculate what maximum amount certain life-saving treatments should be worth, ranks 37th, fully 13 places above the United States, at 79.01 years, nearly one full year more of expected longevity per person than in the US.
Any discussion of the virtues of existing reform proposals in the US must take into account that they are specifically designed to avoid government control of treatment and are intended to avoid anything like the pitfalls of the NHS. While critics of reform warn that expanding coverage at all will put added financial burden on the already-insured, proponents of reform say the current system already rations care and denies treatment to millions every year.
CafeSentido Partner Sites:
[...] a market, because instead of lowering costs and increasing quality, it has driven costs up while reducing quality. This is what the currently proposed reforms seek to [...]