Would Americans Be Healthier in Greece?
England's Daily Mail has produced a misleading attack on the U.S. Healthcare system, blaming the "system" for Americans' relatively low life expectancy. The article, based on a study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, reports that the USA ranks 28th in life expectancy, because Americans live on average "only" to age 78.2, behind countries such as Chile and Greece (the home of the hooliganism pictured above), with Japan, Spain and Switzerland taking first through third place respectively. The article attributes the gap between the US and other developed nations to a comparatively poor US health care system. The article also notes that the US spends more per person on health care than any other nation. This line of criticism is not new; at least one University maintains a website making a similar claim.
The article's argument falls wide of its intended mark. In any society, longevity depends upon any number of factors, of which the quality of health care is but one. Such factors include the prevalence of accidental death and homicide, the prevalence of unhealthy habits like smoking and excessive drinking, and cultural norms regarding diet and exercise. Indeed, according to one source, the 2008 homicide rate in the United States, 5.22/100,000, was more than ten times higher than that in Japan (.45/100,000), more than five times higher than in Spain (.91/100,000), and more than seven times higher than in Switzerland (.72/100,000). According to another source, America's per capita rate of death from automobile accidents is more than twice that of Japan and Spain and also larger than that of Switzerland as well. If, as seems likely, most victims of homicides and automobile accidents are significantly younger than the nation's average life expectancy, then such differences explain at least part of the gap between life expectancy in the United States and that in other countries. Any comparison of the outcomes produced by different health care systems would have to control for the numerous other independent variables that impact life expectancy.
Moreover, differences in accidental deaths and homicides also highlight another fallacy in the Daily Mail's argument, namely, the treatment of health care expenditures as an exogenous variable that "causes" death at particular ages. In fact, such causation may in many cases flow in the opposite direction. After all, many homicides and accidental deaths themselves result in significant health care expenditures. So do accidents and/or shootings and stabbings that do NOT result in death. Thus, any analysis seeking to isolate the impact of health care expenditures upon longevity, other things being equal, would have to treat health care expenditures as a variable driven in part by other independent variables. For all we know, such an analysis could conclude that the US Health Care System is more efficient than suggested by the Daily Mail's simplistic analysis.
