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Monday, August 13, 2007

Americans living longer; but the world is passing it by

The average American lives up to 77.9 years. This continues a streak of a growing life expectancy. However, the United States is being surpassed by other "countries". Right now the American life expectancy is forty-second and surpassed by places like Japan, most of western Europe, Guam (even though Guam is part of the United States), and elsewhere.

Even though the United States government spends more on healthfare and welfare than any other in the world certain problems do exist in America. Two-thirds of all Americans are overweight. The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than other first world countries. It seems there is a perfect storm of bad family practices (how many children are raised by single parents?), bad culture (poor food choices), bad government policies (waste), and insurance red tape.

Meanwhile the lowest area of life expectancy is in Sub-Saharan Africa. Swaziland has an average life expectancy of 34.1 years due to AIDS and other negative aspects.

4 comments:

Andy said...

and left unsaid is the simple fact that well over 10% of the population are denied medical care because of lack of insurance - a situation that doesn't exist in "countries" such as those in Western Europe and Japan.

And then we have a president who refuses to extend insurance protection to how many hundreds of thousands of of uninsured children, purely out of ideological reasons, while having no problem spending untold billions on warfare - and you know where our priorities lie.

Unknown said...

http://www.supportingevidence.com/Life_expectancy_v_health_spending_by_country.html shows that people in the US (= you) spend TWICE the money we (= Europe) pay, for no benefit in terms of life expectancy.

Note that Japan, which has a fairly "older" population than USA or Europe reaches a max in life expectancy while maintaining a comparatively low healthcare cost. Their system is described here : http://www.medhunters.com/articles/healthcareInJapan.html

communi_kate said...

ha! i love that you used FOX news as your source.

Goethe Girl said...

Oh, all these people who want America to have socialized medicine ... In theory, Europe and Canada have universal coverage, but any number of what Americans would consider "ordinary" medical procedures have long waiting times. Catch the Canadian movie "The Barbarian Invasions," which is a devastating portrait of Canadian health care in the case of a man dying of cancer. His son has to hire an ambulance to transport him to Vermont to get an MRI.