US still has the worst, most expensive health care of any high-income country

One reason life expectancy is down: healthcare is literally killing Americans, none more than during pan-panic.

 

Think it might have something to do with unhealthy lifestyles?

 

To be fair, outcomes can’t be blamed entirely, or even mainly on the healthcare system.
When people eat badly, dont exercise, are overweight, smoke, illegal drugs are rampant, and consider basic science as liberal gobblygook, you get what we have.

 

You think that's unrelated to expensive medical care that's geared toward dealing with patients that are sick and need treatment/drugs (more profitable) vs. doing regular preventative care (less profitable)? Don't they play a role in conditioning people to operate this way? If they are simply responding to people's lifestyles, then they aren't set up to condition people to adopt healthy lifestyles either. They are part of the problem either way.

 

Medication is expensive because Americans are content with subsidizing the cost for other countries

 

Might it have something to do with the fact that lots of the food and OTC supplements/drugs we consume here would be illegal to sell people in those places?

 

Yes but at least a few undeserving poor people aren't getting healthcare so the rest of us can feel better about our lousy results.

 

They do all those things in Europe too, I think half the reason people are generally healthier there is that people simply walk and bike more to get around. I generally lose weight on trips to big cities because I'm walking around more, even though I'm gorging more on food and drink than when you're home. I dont think Americans are different than other people, its just that this country is set up in a way that engineers these outcomes, whether its healthcare, car-centric urban/suburban planning, a capitalist food system that resists labeling laws or consumer information, etc.

 

Combination of unhealthy lifestyles and our largely fee for service system of healthcare which provides perverse incentives to defer healthcare.

 

Isn’t the US already the most medicated country in the world ? And doesn’t that shed doubt on the notion of Americans suffering for lack of medication ?

 

Except they don’t.
Sugar intake, US is 20 percent more than anywhere else. We average almost three times the RDA.
Countries That Eat the Most Sugar

we are far less active than Europe
Fitbits reveal the truth: We’re not as active as we claim to be

obesity in the US is at least 25 percent higher than anywhere in the western world.
List of countries by obesity rate - Wikipedia

Drug deaths are higher in the US than anywhere.else in the developed world.
U.S. drug overdose death rates the highest among wealthy nations, USC study finds

 

As with most other issues it is a combination of things that both the left and right are correct about but the politicians have successfully split the voters on issues so it never gets solved.

People lead unhealthy lifestyles
We subsidize costs for other countries and do all the R&D
People abuse the ER system and never pay
The insurance industry incentivizes overcharging
There are tons of others but these are just a few easy ones.

Our incredibly large (pun not really intended) obesity rate probably drives almost all the other mortality differences as it makes literally everything far more complicated and dangerous. Unfortunately neither side is really interested in solving it. They would rather drum up voters with fake problems (access to healthcare when literally anyone can walk into an ER, or death panels and 18 year waits for MRIs, healthy at every size, giant tax increases, etc...) so we'll just keep on keeping on.

Luckily if you pay attention to what you eat, don't do illegal drugs and exercise regularly you can pretty much avoid all the bad outcomes. On top of that you can get a job with good benefits and have cheap care.

 

Wait, so you are arguing that people are abusing the ER system and also holding it up as a benefit in terms of access? So they can go to the ER, which solves the access problem, but that is a bad thing?

 

I'm confident that there is nothing special about Americans vs. Europeans in their inherent propensity to engage in unhealthier behavior when left to their own devices, what is different is they engineer different outcomes because they have accessible healthcare and legally prescribed drugs, more walkable/bike-able cities and towns, prohibitive gas prices, laws that prevent lots of the stuff here we consume in America from even being sold to people, etc.

 

Even setting aside the data I provided, much of this makes my point. It’s not the fault of the healthcare system that laws, easy ways to exercise etc don’t exist.
But meal portions are also higher here, and beyond that, go to Canada and try an Oreo cookie. It tastes different because it has less sugar in it. We eat more frozen foods, more carry out etc.
It goes way beyond healthcare.

 

Yeah, they have access. It's unfortunately crazy expensive because of a myriad of reasons, one of which is the fact that they don't pay which means the hospital has to charge others more, another being the weird insurance market that encourages hospitals to bill $800 for a tylenol. Rather than try to solve these problems the parties will just create half-solutions that divide people along right-left lines for votes. After all, why bother actually doing the work to fix the problem when you can just use it to get votes and not have to actually do anything?

We'd need a multi prong approach that discourages unhealthy lifestyles, clearly defines elective things that should always be out of pocket, lowers costs through things like addressing hospitals billing $800 for a tylenol as well as addressing the insurance market, address the lack of non-ER access for people who don't have insurance, etc... but something like that fixes all of these will never be proposed as then the problem can't be kicked down the road 4 years for votes.

 

It is not a health care system, it is a health profit system. No system is perfect, but should anyone be one accident or illness away from lifelong poverty or worse?

 

This isn't a realistic question. It's based on the fallacy of thinking that life is fair. It isn't. No manner of trying to make it fair will work, there will always be people who get screwed.

Now, should there be large numbers of people getting screwed, no, but wildly unrealistic goals like yours are never going to work.