The methodology here is not good. All they're doing is comparing average health care cost vs life expectancy. They don't measure standard of care, accessibility of treatment, etc.<p>This is especially important when looking at end-of-life care, which I speculate affects these both of these metrics the most. A hospice with private rooms, friendly staff, and social engagement will score lower than a hospital that keeps someone alive in a coma.
life expectancy is a bad measure of healthcare effectiveness<p>1) infant mortality heavily impacts life expectancy. The us has a few subpopulations that have very high infant mortality regardless of socioeconomic status.<p>2) The us has a high teen murder rate<p>3) The US has very high levels of obesity<p>4) There is a tremendous genetic component to life expectancy. Some sub populations (asians) have very high life expectancy, their home countries reflect that. Little dogs for example can live 20 years, where large breeds die at 15.<p>If you pull out 1 and 2, we are up there with other euro nations.<p>Better measures are things like life expectancy after <pick an age where you think we start needing lots of healthcare><p>The sad thing is that the people who are experts in this <i>know</i> these things, but still push the narrative that it is our medical system.
Enslaving the population of doctors would improve the index, since it reduces salaries drastically. Halfway between slavery and market wages is where you find Spain.
You look at the list of most efficient health care systems across the globe and they are not nearly as large as the US. They are typically small and homogeneous. I like the concept of single payor in the US but I do see big hurdles even if we get through the politics which is a big if. I'd point to heterogeneous population and a very wide range of care quality across the country and sometimes even within MSAs.
I always look at these types of reports, and it makes me laugh. It doesn't tell the whole story, and it doesn't tell the true story. We left Canada precisely because of its healthcare system and came to the US. Canada would have require substantially more out of pocket (10s of thousands) with a much longer wait (years), whereas in the US, the out-of-pocket was substantially less ($500) and substantially less time (-2 weeks) to receive assistance. And that was without using insurance from my job.