‘Life Expectancy’ A Bad Measure of Successful Healthcare

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‘Life Expectancy’ A Bad Measure of Successful Healthcare

Written By : Warner Todd Huston

Forbes Magazine will feature a report by the Hudson Institute’s Marie-Josee Kravis who points out the fallacy of tying a nation’s average life expectancy to its level of effective healthcare. In her estimation, life expectancy does not translate necessarily to good or bad healthcare and the left’s penchant for using it as a metric to denigrate America’s healthcare system is illegitimate.

Kravis writes that, “life expectancy reflects not only health care but also diet and lifestyle. A raw match of life expectancy against health care spending is naive.” She then goes on to discuss some of those mitigating factors. Things such as road fatalities, obesity, and drinking and smoking habits are different from country to country and thee factor materially affect life expectancy/ None of them are a result of the healthcare system, either. They are habits of the people, not failures of the healthcare system.

Karvis then offers one stat that might prove a model to get a better measure of healthcare: cancer survival rates. It seems that ours is better than other western nations.

Preliminary findings show U.S. mortality rates for all cancers to be 166.3 per 100,000, compared with an average of 171 in OECD countries and a rate of 173.2 in Canada, 170.2 in France and 175.6 in the U.K. Last year the journal Lancet Oncology found that Americans have a higher survival rate for 13 of the 16 most common forms of cancer.

Kravis makes some good points in her piece and her warning that blind use of life expectancy numbers does not make for informed proof for or against the healthcare system.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.)

aharris

Not on the things she mentions make a difference, but she also should mention that we count our infant mortality statistics different from most other nations. We have looser definitions of what constitutes a live birth than the WHO advocates using. And when you are counting babies who aren't going to survive or have a razor thin chance to survive as live births, it's going to skew some of your numbers.
http://conservativebootcamp.com martinhale

The subtlety that most people miss about life expectancy figures is that they are age sensitive. That is to say that life expectancy only holds meaning within the context of how old you are. One thing that's eminently clear about America is that life expectancy for those over 60 is significantly better than the life expectancy of those of a similar age in other countries. We may not have the top overall life expectancy, but we do have the best life expectancy for those who're entering the last third of life.