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Americans have a lower life expanctancy than Costa Ricans, Thai people and Chileans. The US and China have roughly the same life expectancy. There are two scenarios: Americans live incredibly unhealthy lives and require 17% of GDP to be spent on health care to keep a decent middle income life expectancy or Americans live some worse than other countries and have somewhat better medical care yet get minimal bang for the buck.
We do. We’re rapidly approaching 50% obesity. We eat like crap and don’t exercise and that by itself I think lowers life expectancy by at least a decade. Add in stress and it’s like nobody should be shocked by the American life expectancy. It’s like asking why the car where you never change the oil needs more repairs than the one that gets regular maintenance.
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The question should be if Costa Rican, Thai, and Chilean gringos have lower life expectancies than Costa Ricans, Thais, and Chileans.
Globally, the US has unimpressive average scores (surprisingly so, for non-Noticers) on standardized tests like the PISA for… socioeconomic reasons. Yet, after a simple control, the US comes out looking solid.
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Yep.
Most medical interventions don't matter that much for people without lifestyle disorders. Skin cancer, for example, collectively only takes 9 days off U.S. life expectancy. So if we CURED skin cancer it doesn't move the needle. Rinse and repeat with a bunch of other diseases.
On the other hand, the existence of diabetes likely lowers U.S. life expectancy by years, and that's with all the treatment. Did you know that 1% of the U.S. budget is spent on dialysis and the average 40 year dialysis patient only lives 8 years?
All in all, we spend like $5 trillion a year just to undo all the damage from our lifestyle diseases. It's pretty sick.
The crazy pill is that most medical interventions don't matter that much for lifestyle disorders, either, because for the most part, they can't undo the damage from our lifestyle diseases. I was just listening to this podcast with a couple MDs, and he was talking about chronic conditions generally, and a bit about obesity, specifically:
Moreover, they often have patients who don't want to change their disordered lifestyle and wouldn't carry through with doing it even if the doctor had training and a billable way of doing it. So, they sort of default to, "When the chickens come home to roost, I guess we'll give you a drug to help manage your symptoms somewhat."
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