More at Graph Paper Diaries about Health Care

Is Life Expectancy the Right Way to Measure Health Care Success? bsking is back, baby. A thorough post with graphs! And more graphs! 

There’s a actually a few different ways to calculate life expectancies, and the exact details of what you’re trying to do matter quite a bit. But one thing most ways of calculating it have in common is that they are all impacted quite a bit by people who die young. This is an issue a lot of us are familiar with when looking at historic life expectancies, which tend to be weighed down by the high number of children who died before their 5th birthday. This is a big enough issue that the UN actually looks at both life expectancy from birth and life expectancy at age 15, just to account for both child mortality and mortality at older ages.

So the point is, if you’re in a developed country and you want to understand why your life expectancy looks like it does, the first thing to take a look at is what kills your young people. So what kills young people in the US? Guns, drugs and cars. (Emphasis mine.)

When we look at American culture, including the number of immigrants we absorb, it jumps out at you that we are different from other developed nations in terms of guns, drugs, and cars. You can blame that on American attitudes or the legal system, or the kind of immigrants we take in, or the disequilibrium of having large percentages of multiple races and ethnicities, or any number of other things: bad education, bad housing policy, factory farming...keep going...

WRT the many charts, consider what nations we are being compared with. Other developed nations.  Picture the populations of those nations in your mind for about ten seconds each.  They don't er, look like America, do they?  Might there be some differences in the childhood death rates of various groups, and specifically guns, drugs, and cars? Some yes, some no, but there is variety. Lots of variety. Maybe it matters. 

But guns, drugs, and cars are not the fault of the health care system, are they? So right away we should be recoiling from solutions that involve changes to the health care system.  It's just looking for our keys under the street light instead of where we dropped them. 

Bethany also put up a post about Gell-Mann Amnesia with specific reference to believing things on TikTok.