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Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove

(www.nature.com)
201 points andsoitis | 7 comments | 15 Oct 24 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.712s | source | bottom
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defrost ◴[16 Oct 24 00:22 UTC] No.41854450[source]▶
For an interesting side piece:

    Curiously, however, for a system apparently stultified by the dead hand of government, Australia’s health system far outperforms the free market-based US healthcare system, which spends nearly twice as much per capita as Australia to deliver far worse outcomes — including Americans dying five years younger than us.
The shocking truth: Australia has a world-leading health system — because of governments

Source: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/10/16/pubic-private-healthcar...

Bypass: https://clearthis.page/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crikey.com.au%2F...

    Overall, we now have the fourth-highest life expectancy in the world.

   This is contrary to the narrative that pervades the media about our health system — one in which our “frontline” health workers heroically battle to overcome government neglect and inadequate spending, while the population is beset by various “epidemics” — obesity, alcohol, illicit drugs.

    In fact, Australian longevity is so remarkable that in August The Economist published a piece simply titled “Why do Australians live so long?”
Other references:

The Economist: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2024/08/23/why-do-a...

AU Gov Report: Advances in measuring healthcare productivity https://www.pc.gov.au/research/completed/measuring-healthcar...

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tightbookkeeper ◴[16 Oct 24 04:52 UTC] No.41855732[source]▶
demographics in the US are very different than Australia, I suspect those in the bottom 1/3rd of US health drag it down significantly.
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koyote ◴[16 Oct 24 04:59 UTC] No.41855768[source]▶
I assume you are referring to a larger amount of people living in poverty in the US?

Could this also (partially) be explained by the cost of healthcare? Something like a downwards spiral where average people end up poor either due to direct costs of healthcare or neglecting their own healthcare due to cost?

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1. tightbookkeeper ◴[16 Oct 24 05:07 UTC] No.41855797[source]▶
demographic differences of all kinds:

- greater usage of surgeries and prescriptions, leading to greater exposure to medical malpractice (the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.)

- higher birthrate. more pregnancies.

- less cultural tolerance of abortion. Greater willingness to take on risky pregnancies

- single parent homes (people with less family support)

- ethnicities which are more susceptible to certain disease and lifestyle risks

- greater exposure to crime in impoverished areas

- more life time spent traveling in cars

- more restricted access to health insurance (as you said only accessing healthcare in dire emergency)

The US is a different world than most countries which tend to be geographically tight and culturally homogenous. It's very difficult to make comparisons, not to mention differences in data collection and reporting ethics.

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2. biztos ◴[16 Oct 24 06:35 UTC] No.41856199[source]▶
> medical malpractice (the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.)

Not to downplay the malpractice problem, but this doesn’t sound remotely plausible. Do you have some sources to back up this claim?

I googled around a bit and it appears to come from some sloppy misuse of statistics in a journal one time, plus internet amplification.

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3. koyote ◴[16 Oct 24 11:11 UTC] No.41857760[source]▶
Those examples are mostly good ones, but:

> The US is a different world than most countries which tend to be geographically tight and culturally homogenous

I am not sure how much you know about Australia, but homogeneity and geographically tight is definitely not how you would describe it.

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4. rsynnott ◴[16 Oct 24 12:41 UTC] No.41858397[source]▶
> The US is a different world than most countries which tend to be geographically tight and culturally homogenous

So, if this was the issue, you'd probably expect outcomes to be better in less diverse, physically smaller US states. Looking at, say, life expectancy by state (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_map_...) doesn't seem to bear this out, really; on your theory you'd probably expect, say, West Virgina to be handily beating California or Texas.

Also, of course, _Australia_, which started the thread, could hardly be called either geographically tight or culturally homogenous. Australia is roughly the size of the contiguous United States.

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5. tightbookkeeper ◴[16 Oct 24 15:41 UTC] No.41860386[source]▶
The CDC doesn’t record medical malpractice as a category for cause of death or injury. It’s grouped under “accidents” in their statistics (their official 3rd ranked category).

> The CDC’s published mortality statistics, however, count only the “underlying cause of death,” defined as the condition that led a person to seek treatment.

Because of this political choice the information comes from 3rd parties digging into the accidents category.

https://www.propublica.org/article/study-urges-cdc-to-revise...

6. tightbookkeeper ◴[16 Oct 24 15:49 UTC] No.41860495[source]▶
Indeed. On the spectrum of health risks Australia is more like the US than France, but it’s far away. The most similar country is possibly Russia or Brazil.
7. tightbookkeeper ◴[16 Oct 24 16:11 UTC] No.41860807[source]▶
If you ignore massive wealth inequality.

The point about less diverse is that’s it’s easier to operate health programs which match the values of the population.

Not that small ethnic group = healthy.