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Originally Posted by aceventura3
I did read the report. Regarding infant mortality, in the US the adolescent 15-19) fertility rate 41 per 10,000 compared to Canada's 14. A statistic like this can have an impact on infant mortality rates due to simply understanding or not understanding prenatal needs and not the quality of available health care. If a 15 year old girl is embarrassed by her pregnancy, hides it, and doesn't get proper prenatal care the odds of a healthy birth goes down. If she determines she is pregnant early, goes to the doctor, and follows doctors order the odds of a healthy birth goes up. All I have been saying is in order to come to correct conclusions, you have to drill down into the numbers.
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You, of course, have to evidence to suggest that babies out of teenage pregnancies are more in danger of dying not because of lack of access, but because of lack of understading...
In fact, the US has higher infant mortality, and mortality for kids under 5, for a variety of reasons that go beyond neonatal care. The US does worse for mortality of children under 5 to pneumonia, for example.
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In my living will, I want my family to pull the plug. I am more concerned with the quality of life not the duration. Why is that difficult to understand? If I get old and can not think clearly, have sex, eat what I want, function in society, control bodily functions, my wife has been instructed to leave a loaded gun within my reach.
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You can't be serious with this crap. You want to live a shorter life? Fine, but so why pay more for it? Ill tell you what, cancel your health insurance and start sending me 100 bucks a month. It will be cheaper than your health insurance, and you will die even earlier.
Besides, this is based on the assumption that access to health care only affects when people die, not their quality of life when alive...
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I am not sure what "higher mortality to infectious diseases" stat you refer to, that leads to the conclusion the US health care system is inferior to other developed nations, can you clarify?
Fewer hospital beds per capita is interesting but what about doctors per 10,000 people in the report. The US has 26. Canada has 19. Canada has 101 nurses the US has 94. But the US has 177 "other health care providers", Canada did not show a number. So what do you conclude from that?
After reading the report I conclude that is takes an active imagination to conclude with any degree of real certainty that the health care system of any developed nation is materially better or worse than another.
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No, it takes an active imagination to try to come up with specific excuses as to why the US does worse in almost every single health statistic, especially when the disparities don't match up with the claim you are making.
As for the infectious diseases part, look up years of life lost to communicable diseases, and you will see how death to infectious diseases affects the life expectancy rate. Oh, and death to infectious diseases in the US declined for most of the 20th century, but started going up again in 1980...
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Just for fun, I created my own mortality table in Excel so I could easily do "what ifs". Population 10,000, maximum age 100, death rates systematically increase each decade for the population start with 1 death per year in year 1 ending with 925 deaths in year 100, but 200 deaths per year from 90 to 99. Life expectancy was 73.29. Then simply adding 200 homicide deaths in year 25 (meaning year 100 deaths went down to 725) the life expectancy dropped to 71.79. Homicide rates makes a big enough difference to "move the needle".
You can say "oh, you just made those numbers up", or "thats not relevant" or whatever - but again my point is I understand what I did and the assumptions I made. the WHO report is not clear and I challenge you to clearly explain how they made their adjustments to life expectancy and why.
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They made no adjustments to their life expectancy table. What you are doing is comparing different variables, why I don't know.
The WHO has exactly the same number for life expectancy as that calculated in the US. The two things you are trying to compare is the data the WHO has on "Healthy life expectancy" and "life expectancy." They are different things, and so to claim that the WHO is trying to mess up the numbers only shows how little you know.
As far as homicides go, look around a bit more. Soon you will find the mortality rate for injuries, which will include not only homicides, but any and all accidents. You will see that in the US the mortality rate for injuries is 47, for Canada 34 and for France 48. In other words, the difference in mortality rate to injuries is not enough to explain the difference in overall mortality rate for Canada, and should actually benefit the US in a comparison to France.