Americans Less Healthy, But Outlive Brits

An anonymous reader writes with this intriguing snippet: "Older Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, but they live as long or even longer than their English peers, according to a new study by researchers from the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. Researchers found that while Americans aged 55 to 64 have higher rates of chronic diseases than their peers in England, they died at about the same rate. And Americans age 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — had a lower death rate than similar people in England, according to findings published in the journal Demography."

Comments

Well, duh

[metrix007]

The UK is more depressing what with its annual 4 hours of sunshine and the best looking women maybe rating a 7. Who can forget the warm beer, bad food and lovable totalitarian government?

I'm not kidding. You don't think all of that stuff can have a negative affect on a persons psyche, perhaps affecting their health? Especially the warm beer...that's especially depressing.

Re:Well, duh

[h4rm0ny]

If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese. America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese. This is the country that invented spray on cheese. Everytime I talk about American cheese with Americans, they say, 'ah, but we do have good cheeses, you just have to look for them.' And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful, just bad. I don't know what it is. The US has contributed some fantastic music, movies, plays, inventions, economic theories, software and people to the world. Really great, great stuff.

But what you call cheese could kill a rhino at ten paces.

Re:Well, duh

[Fozzyuw]

If you want to talk reality, forget beer comparisons, try cheese.

Disclaimer. I was born and raise in Wisconsin. In fact I still live here. I went to London for a year for school and married a French women. I've spent lot of time in France, a country that prides itself in cheese. In the US, Wisconsin prides itself for it's dairy products, including cheese.

America is home to the worlds most disgusting cheese.

I wouldn't go that far. It's certainly not as good as Europe, but there are reasons for the lack of variety and therefor flavor in cheese.

And they try to give me some Wisconsin cheddar which admittedly is not awful

That's because it's not awful, it's good. The problem is that cheddar simply is a bland cheese. Of course, you do have to find the good stuff. What cheese lover really gets existed over *chedder*?! lol It can go great on burgers (I still prefer swiss) but it's simply a dull cheese and that's not Wisconsin's fault. It's just as bad in Chedder England.

I don't know what it is.

It has to do with milk pasteurization laws. It prevents a lot of cheeses from being made. Lots of them goat cheese. That's why goat cheese in the US is always the same terrible crappy stuff and why you never see the variety of cheese you have in Europe. It has really grown to be a cultural thing.

But likewise, these same laws are the reason you don't see boxes of milk on store shelves, outside of refrigeration units. I was confused the first time I was in France at my wife's house and I had some cereal for breakfast. She had me pull a box of milk from the pantry. I thought all milk had to be kept refrigerated. Then we talked with the shop owner of Nalaa's cheese in Green Bay. He explained the pasteurization laws and why we can't get the good variety of cheese here and how he was limited on what he could import and sell.

American's who haven't spent much time outside of the US simply don't get exposed to what's out there. And those that do, might not be brave enough to ever try it because some of that cheese simply smells like a rotten skunk carcass in the Texas heat, but tastes like the heavens. But many people won't get past that smell. Case in point, we've turned many of my friends onto Rachlette cheese. That's not as pungent as some goat cheeses, but some had some real reservations of ever trying it. It smells up the kitchen when cutting it (who cut the cheese? There's a reason for that phrase).

Of course, one of the biggest complements at my recent wedding (in France) was the fact that we had a cheese buffet. A table with over 30 types of cheeses on it. You've never seen American's so confused and pleased. I shocked one of my friends to go and eat every kind of cheese he could find.

It really is a cheese repression.

Now, beer. Microbrews have really come a long way to pass by the basic Miller and Bud products we have. You can find some pretty good tasting beer in Wisconsin. New Glarus, Leienenkugels, Capital Brew, etc. are good beer. It's also much more expensive and in a place like Wisconsin where quantity can seem more important than quality, you'll find people still turn to Miller or Bud Light. And when you're use to drinking bland for so long, having something with flavor becomes too much of a shock.

I think the UK has a better quality average, but the US also suffers from gimmicks. There's a billion beer makers with a billion private label beers each trying to sound like their beer is something new or different. This one has LIME! This one has LEMON! This one is called "Fat Squirrel", this is "Moose Drool", oh, look, a Monty Python branded beer! Here's a Pumpkin beer!

*sigh*

It's complicated.

Point is, Wisconsin doesn't have crap for cheese. What they do make is good, but what they do make really isn't good cheese to begin with. You can thank US laws and now US culture as it

Re:Well, duh

[Will.Woodhull]

TFA is consistent with the observation that 90% of American health care dollars are spent during the last few months of the patient's life.

If USA health care invested more money in early and preventive treatment, people might not live any longer, but they would be in better health until old age problems caught up with them. That is clear from TFA when viewed within the context of the differences between USA and UK health care delivery systems.

But USA health care is profit oriented, and there is more profit to be made in selling cures and disease treatments than there is in preventing diseases. Not only does preventive health care lack as much opportunity for profit, it reduces the market for such money makers as AIDS drugs, cancer therapies, antihypertensive agents, and antidepressants.

The USA needs a major reform of health care. Even if the recent legislation is put fully into effect, it won't go far enough; it will be band aid approach to broken bones. There needs to be a break-up of the current system. Prohibiting the sale of health insurance for profit would be a good place to start.

Even so!

[Hitman_Frost]

Despite all this clever wording, Americans do not outlive Brits in the vast majority of cases.

USA - Male life expectancy 75.6 years, female 80.8 years.
UK - Male life expectancy 77.2 years, female 81.6 years.

Notice how one set of numbers are larger than the others.

Misleading summary

[jcupitt65]

The summary is misleading. Brits, on average, outlive Americans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

This study compares the survival of people with similar diseases once they become ill.

Re:Misleading summary

[khallow]

And life expectancy is misleading because it doesn't take into account different definitions of infant mortality or the US's greater acceptance of personal risk.

Re:Even so

[damburger]

Also, the British thinktank who instituted this are a right-wing one, no doubt plotting to destroy the NHS alongside the Tory allies. So they publish a non-peer reviewed piece of 'research' designed to conclude what they want it to conclude. Bullshit.

The Tories recently gutted NICE, the body that evaluates the cost effectiveness of drugs to see if they should be made available on the NHS. They were doing a fine job, but got nothing but shit because they prevented pharmaceutical companies gouging into the state healthcare providers ample budget. When retards in the US talk about 'death panels' they are usually referring to these guys, and they don't get much of a good press in the UK either.

Basically, they talked to terminal patients to find out how much of their life they would be willing to give up to remain in good health for the rest of their life, and used this to calibrate a 'quality adjusted life year' which represented the value of a drug. Thus they could reject a hugely overpriced drug that added 2 weeks to the life of a late-stage cancer patient and spend the money saved on a drug that might allow a very sick child to reach adulthood. That second part *never* got a mention by the rightwing critics. When opportunity costs are being used to make the state healthcare system more efficient whilst forcing drug companies to charge realistic prices based on what their products can actually do, the right suddenly decides to reject economic language and talk shit about 'death panels' and NICE 'killing patients'.

Yes, we ration healthcare in this country - but up until now it has been based on how much extra life (across the whole population) that healthcare can give. The US rations healthcare too - based on how rich or poor you are. Our system is, frankly, better.

Re:Well, duh, it's when Medicare kicks in!

[elwinc]

Overall, life expectancy in Canada and Britain exceed life expectancy in the USA.

Canadian life expectancy = 80.3 years, UK ife expectancy = 78.7 years, and US life expectancy = 78.0 years (in 2007) according to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and that's because Canada and the UK have life-long public health care.

But when medicare starts to cover US citizens at age 65, suddenly US citizens have a much better outlook. US citizens lucky enough to survive until age 65 and receive medicare coverage have a longer life expectancy than their British peers.

Actually, if you go back and study the data at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf you'll discover that the US has both higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy than Canada and almost every developed European democracy (even Germany who absorbed the disaster known as East Germany a few decades back). For what its worth, the US also pays much more per capita for their lower life expectancies. I wonder if this data would change anyone's mind about the benefits of health care reform...