Slashdot Mirror
US Life Expectancy Declines For the First Time Since 1993 (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States. Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans. Its findings show increases in "virtually every cause of death. It's all ages," said David Weir, director of the health and retirement study at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Over the past five years, he noted, improvements in death rates were among the smallest of the past four decades. "There's this just across-the-board [phenomenon] of not doing very well in the United States." Overall, life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.8 in 2015, according to the latest data. The last time U.S. life expectancy at birth declined was in 1993, when it dropped from 75.6 to 75.4, according to World Bank data. The overall death rate rose 1.2 percent in 2015, its first uptick since 1999. More than 2.7 million people died, about 45 percent of them from heart disease or cancer.
The dumbest thing Americans do is assume that consumers act rationally, never-mind should be expected to act rationally. Health care is an insurance product that you want everyone to be forced to pay into so that they take the quickest path to getting back to contributing towards the GDP. None of this should be up to "consumers" in so far as somebody who needs health care gets to shop around if they're sick, blind, alone, or otherwise disadvanted in a miriad of other ways - nor providers, who shouldn't be looking at competition and profit margins for the kind of work they're in.
But I get it - you grew up with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Theocracies are hell and are up there with fascist dictatorships and totalarian communism in the really really shit ways to run a country stakes.
Bright future, if goosestepping whilst clutching a bible , is your thing.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Excellent plan. So now when someone gets say cancer, unless they happen to have tens or possibly hundreds of thousands stashed away for cancer-day, they can either try to apply for a loan or go the way of walter white. Advanced health care is so expensive, there is no practical way for most people to pay it out of pocket and the demand is inelastic (people who have a serious condition requiring immediate care do not have the time or the capabilities to compare prices and go to the other side of the country to get their treatment slightly cheaper) which make market based solutions terribly inefficient at providing it cheaply.
Moreover, since the demand is fairly static there's no way of effectively competing in a market with existing hospitals. Take something as simple as X-rays for example: a given area will have a fairly constant demand for xrays that's directly tied to the size of the population, let's say 10 000 as an example. But the machines and the staff to run x-ray machines cost a lot. The price of a simple machine is around a million. If we assume a life-span of 10 years for the device, that factors down to roughly 10 dollars an image as the base cost (+ staff costs + margins for the hospital). If someone else buys a device to compete with the first one, they too will have to try and recoup their costs, which will drive the base-price of an image up in both hospitals, raising the costs overall. If demand is split evenly between both it means the base-cost will double.
The infrastructure to provide advanced medical care cost enormous amounts of money, which acts both as a barrier to entry to the market, as well as making sure that increasing competition will lower the general efficiency of a system once you start getting more capacity than you'd actually need to satisfy the needs of a given population.
Or, you could just do what most other developed economies have already done and institute direct controls on pricing. Just having a public option for insurance allowing the government to leverage its size and negotiate down prices would be a start. There's no justifiable reason for allowing companies to rake in gigantic profits on a life-saving service that pretty much everyone will need at some point in their life.
To this day, I've never understood why the richest country on the planet allows its citizens to be left to die or saddled with massive debt over medical issues when there are several existing models of providing first world level advanced care at a much cheaper cost per capita (in fact, every single existing medical system is cheaper than the US one)..
But that requires treating health care as a right of citizens, not as a commercial commodity, which goes against the divine mantra of 'the free market is the solution to everything' that seems to dominate american politicians' discussion on health as if the only way to keep people healthy is to sell them health.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
But, you can't have poor people dying because they can't afford healthcare... and an individual cannot really negotiate with a large corporation - especially when the price for turning down their offer is to die.
So what can we do... mmm well we could pool a lot of people's money together. They could negotiate prices as a group - which can be on equal footing with the suppliers, and the group as a whole isn't "about to die" so the negotiations are no longer happening under duress. Then you can also use standard actuarial table structures to spread risk around so that those with little risk right now can help cover those with high risk - and get better results for all.
Of course, such systems work better the larger the pool - so you will want to get EVERYBODY in on it (that's a fundamental attribute of actuarial tables - they only WORK if they are BIG). Ideally - you want the pool to be available, in it's entirety, to pay for healthcare - so it should probably not be profit driven.
There was a system, very much like that, in Scottland in the 19th century - it was actually the first ever use of actuarial tables to spread risk, instituted by the Scottish church to help the wealthier congregations assist the poorer ones in their care duties.
But it doesn't seem ideal to have a religious organisation run this - after all, people don't all have the same religion and it would cause friction that would limit the pool of potential contributors.
Mmm we could set up a massive, non-religiously affiliated organisation to collect dues and manage the fund, handle the negotiations and take care of the payments when we need it !
Seems like a huge amount of effort to get set up and convince everybody to sign on though - and a bit of a chicken/egg problem since the greatest benefits (the negotiation power) only comes when you have lots of members, but to get lots of members you need to offer the benefits.
If only there was some organisation that was already established, had lots of negotiation power, the infrastructure to collect and manage dues with an already existing tiered-structure to scale your dues to your income, capacity to handle payments, no profit motive and no religious affiliation which we could leverage to run this national insurance scheme for us... I know we can use our government ! They're perfect ! This is EXACTLY the sort of thing we invented them for !
Oh wait, we just invented single payer healthcare.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And this is different from forcing everyone to pay for the military how?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.