Infant mortality and the early deaths of the obese & chronically ill drag our life expectancy down. If you make it to 65, you're likely to make it another 20 years or something like that.
Anyone want to comment on our health expenditures being double or triple that of other countries?
Here is my two cents, lots of various factors:
Profits and over complicated administrative procedures of insurance companies
Fancy hospital construction, all the hospital systems competing with each other for affluent suburban patients
Litigation, we are lawsuit crazy
Obesity and poor eating and no exercise, we go everywhere in our cars
Poverty and associated poor health outcomes and habits in those communities
More procedure response to EVERYTHING, we want to live forever and our doctors go along with it (also because of lawsuit factor above) and television advertising plays a role
Drug prices, we subsidize the whole world. We and our insurers pay top dollars for drugs, while all the other governments around the world force the drug companies to accept lower prices
Addiction, we have a worse problem than others
Our doctors make more money than other doctors around the world, mainly specialists
Fraud: people in the US are more likely to fraudulently game the system (more than in other nations) and the government bureaucracies and, to some extent, insurers are not effective in combatting fraud.
But keep in mind that most of the world’s advances in medical care come out of the US. So a final factor, more altruistic, is that our consumers and insurers are subsidizing world wide R&D big time.
