Quote:
Originally Posted by Dom1
Our health issues are not necessarily due to health care. Our diet causes much of the problem. We probably have the fattest nation of the industrialized nations (and maybe of the non-industrialized nations). European foreign exchange students come over here and almost always gain a bunch of weight due to eating the same crap that many people here eat. I would bet that our drug problems are among the worst as well, which definitely leads to problems with birth. The health care is not necessarily the reason for the statistics given above. Do you think that nations in Europe have nearly as many fast food places as we do? I am sure they have some drug problems, but we seem to have more of it, and those people contribute to the mortality rates of infants more than the non drug users do.
Statistics can often be misleading.
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I see your point, and you are correct to some degree, but that doesn't change the central observation: we spend much more on health care than any other Western country : there's a gap of over 5 GDP points between us and the next most prolific spender, France. That's a huge difference! To provide some scale: 5% of our GDP covers slightly more than the Pentagon budget.
This huge overspending outweighs by far any of the health penalties entailed by obesity and drugs. With all that money, if we allocated our health care spending as efficiently as Europe, we would be the healthiest people on Earth, with the most doctors, hospital beds, etc. But, despite our profligate spending, we are in relatively poor health, and have fewer doctors and hospital beds than other Western nations.
Or, to take a different approach: as a hypothetical, if we could get solid data and use it to statistically ignore the ill effects of obesity and of drugs, we would probably rise into the middle of the pack--all that overspending would still be wasted, since we would only be
as healthy as everybody else.
In other words, with or without taking into account our various health penalties, we're clearly spending too much on health care, without actually providing adequate health care.