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US Life Expectancy Can Vary By 20 Years Depending On Where You Live (npr.org)
After analyzing records from every U.S. county between 1980 and 2014, Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and his team found that life expectancy can vary by more than 20 years from county to county. "In counties with the longest lifespans, people tended to live about 87 years, while people in places with the shortest lifespans typically made it only about 67," reports NPR. From the report: The discrepancy is equivalent to the difference between the low-income parts of the developing world and countries with high incomes, Murray notes. For example, it's about the same gap as the difference between people living in Japan, which is among countries with the longest lifespans, and India, which has one of the shortest, Murray says. The U.S. counties with the longest life expectancy are places like Marin County, Calif., and Summit County, Colo. -- communities that are well-off and more highly educated. Counties with the shortest life expectancy tend to have communities that are poorer and less educated. The lowest is in Oglala Lakota County, S.D., which includes the Pine Ridge Native American reservation. Many of the other counties with the lowest life expectancy are clustered along the lower Mississippi River Valley as well as parts of West Virginia and Kentucky, according to the analysis. There's no sign of the gap closing. In fact, it's appears to be widening. Between 1980 and 2014, the gap between the highest and lowest lifespans increased by about two years. The reasons for the gap are complicated. But it looks like the counties with the lowest lifespans haven't made much progress fighting significant health problems such as smoking and obesity. The study has been published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Are you retarded?
The poor and lazy get it for free or dirt cheap. The people in the middle then paid for it all. Premiums and deductibles skyrocketed after the ACA was passed.
The poor and lazy sometimes got free care at emergency rooms or at free clinics, but they STILL get that. Those costs haven't gone down, and those are not directly funded by responsible people paying for their own insurance. The idea was to get the poor people paying SOME amount in, and getting them preventative / early treatment to reduce costs. The problem is many are still paying nothing, those that are paying are getting subsidized by the state, and ultimately the middle class, and preventative care ultimately increases costs. Further, the mandate that requires everyone to be insured just allows insurance companies to jack up the prices because fuck you, you HAVE to pay.
It's a fucking joke! The only "pro" to it is that more people are insured. But ultimately, it's a con in every sense of the word.
From what I've seen personally, quality and availability of care went down. (Current doctor/group is shit, other doctors/groups not taking new patients, across various cities in California.)
What we need to do is simple:
Get rid of the mandate that everyone has to have insurance.
Sever health, dental, vision, etc. insurance from employment.
Require all charges to be identical regardless of insurance policy or lack of insurance. Currently, the uninsured or "underinsured" are given bills with line items that are absolute bullshit. Only the large insurance companies see a bill that somewhat reflects reality.
Require all insurance payouts to be given directly to the insured (or beneficiary) and never directly to the care provider. Most of the time the insurance company never actually pays the amount they claim to.
Stop treating uninsured drug abusers, smokers, alcoholics, hyper fatties, etc. with any public money, either directly or indirectly via requirements to treat at ERs, etc. If they're insured and pay their premiums they should be covered as outlined in their plan.
If you want "free", universal healthcare then you have to do something more drastic. You have to legislate costs of drugs, procedures, etc. And all that will end up doing is providing the insurance companies a guaranteed revenue stream that they will directly lobby to increase ad infinitum.