[yummyfajitas]

Slight nitpick - accidents are not a top cause of death in the US, they are merely a top cause of early death.

But this has a disproportionate effect on low life expectancy, because early death has a disproportionate effect on life expectancy stats. 1 person dying at age 20 (instead of 80) has the same effect on life expectancy as 60 people dying at age 79 (instead of 80).

[kiba]

I have my stats memorized. Accidents are at the very least in the top ten cause of death every year. Every year, around 100K people die in accidents, of which 40K were car accidents. However, that is dwarfed by 600K people dying of heart disease and 570K people dying of cancer every year.

[tptacek]

Not sure how we get to the word "dwarfed" in that analysis, since despite ranking below Europe on life expectancy, the US does significantly better on heart disease and cancer mortality.

Point being: something's going on here that confounds life expectancy comparisons.

[kiba]

I didn't disagree with your analysis. I was only pointing out that accidents(ranked 5th) are indeed one of the top cause of death in the US, which I didn't make it clear in my last comment.

[jamesaguilar]

I believe we also count infant mortality in life expectancy. Not sure.

[Retric]

Your statistics are simply wrong. Which is why they numbers don't seem to add up correctly. US has a mixed heath-care system with some people reviving enough treatment that it actually lowers there chances of survival and others getting little to no treatment.

PS: It's hard to get good data. Japan has twice the US suicide rate and a longer life expectancy. However, some of their numbers are off due to people not reporting deaths so they can continue to collect pension benefits.

[tptacek]

Is there data to back up your argument? What you're saying seems to amount to this:

If you're wealthy, the US health care system is so good that not only does it outdo Europe's system at handling heart disease and cancer, but it does so much better than Europe's that the effect is evident from mortality statistics even though 75MM people in the US make less than $22,000/yr. At the same time, you're saying that regardless of the fact that US hospitals are required by law to treat indigent patients regardless of cost, enough people receive so little care that they bias the mortality statistics.

This seems like an extraordinary claim.

I am not an apologist for the US health care system, as a cursory look at HNSearch will show you. But I don't think the problem is that people don't get care in the US; it is, as policy wonks will tell you, better (from a health care perspective) to be homeless in 2012 than it was to be President in 1955. The problem is that the US health care system routinely bankrupts patients.

[yummyfajitas]

The problem is that the US health care system routinely bankrupts patients.

This is unclear as well. This stylized "fact" only became a talking point in the last election, and is drawn almost exclusively from a deeply flawed study by Elizabeth Warren.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/06/elizabet...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/will-hea...

Among other flaws, the study doesn't measure causation or even correlation.

[tptacek]

Here is a list, I feel like it's fairly representative, of conditions that will generate an "automatic decline" for a regional health insurer. I chose it because it was the first on the Google SERP; I can be more rigorous if I need to be:

http://echealthinsurance.com/health-insurance-advisor/wp-con...

The fun stuff starts on age 18.

A huge number of Americans have conditions with a "D" in the right-hand column, which is "automatic decline coverage". Many of those people cannot get insurance on the private market at any cost.

Why do you have a hard time believing that our health care system needlessly bankrupts people?

Is it something along the lines of, "there is a savvy way to negotiate this system without having health insurance"? I'm prepared to concede that someone knows someone who's mom paid pennies on the dollar for care by playing hardball with providers. I just don't think that's a viable solution to the problem overall; providers will more often than not just send the bills to collections.

[Retric]

Your assuming at the lower end of the scale are accurately diagnosed.

However, for a simple idea of how bad the US healthcare system really is look at this: http://www.cddep.org/tools/methicillin_resistant_staphylococ...

[jerf]

No, he's not assuming anything like that. He's observing that if the US is slightly worse on average (for the sake of argument), but you have what you claim are a large number of people being actively harmed by the system, then to make up for it you must have a large number of being receiving unbelievably good outcomes, or you can't end up with "slightly worse on average" in the end. It's a very simple mathematical point.

I'd observe that in general, the complaint with the US medical system is that it is too expensive, or that for what we pour into it it ought to be clearly the best everywhere across all measures instead of merely near the top. (Which is rather more accurate; it isn't "slightly below average", it's "slightly behind best", and there are rather a lot of individual measures in which it is the best.) It isn't that it's a terrible system in general. You have to game stats pretty hard to make it an actively bad system in terms of raw outcome.

[tptacek]

In 2007 there were 8,324 deaths linked to MRSA in the UK. In 2005, there were between 4,429-8,850 (6,639 w/ 95% CI) deaths linked to MRSA in the US. There are more than 5 times as many people in the United States than in the UK.

I obviously do not have the specific stats at my fingertips to refute the anecdote you've supplied, but if there were a way for us to bet on which of our arguments the correct statistic is going to support, I'd bet on my argument.

[joshuahedlund]

> Every year, around 100K people die in accidents, of which 40K were car accidents.

I don't know about overall accidents, and I don't have numbers memorized, but I know that vehicle accident deaths have dropped pretty significantly over the last couple of decades. Trends are relevant, too.

[ableal]

Well, then the upcoming self-driving vehicles will give us another bump up in the life expectancy figure.

Probably some part of the vehicle deaths will "leak" over to other categories, but there should be an overall reduction.