Comment by umvi
5 hours ago
> Japan spends ~$5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD
Is Japan's life expectancy because of its healthcare or culture? I'm pretty sure Americans would not live to the same age as Japanese even with Japanese healthcare because of our low nutrition high sugar diets...
Life expectancy is not a useful health care system comparison because the primary factors that cause divergences between developed countries aren't based in the health system --- they're things like traffic accidents, homicides, drug overdoses, and suicide. Yes, CVD will appear in that list of factors, but it's noisy; despite having structurally the same health care system, states in New England will have Scandinavian CVD outcomes while southern states (some of whom actually do a better job than New England at making care available) have developing-nation CVD outcomes.