
Efficiency of Our Healthcare Systems - KyleOS
https://kyso.io/KyleOS/healthcare_life_exp
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vikramkr
I think the opioid crisis is more the problem than "inefficient healthcare"[1]

Inefficient healthcare sounds like it's just that ambulance transit times are
too long or that there's too much paperwork. It doesn't bring to mind "pharma
companies getting consumers addicted to opioids later triggering a massive
addiction crisis that nobody is equipped or prepared to tackle"

[1]
[http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/49/1/1....](http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/49/1/1.2)

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KyleOS
I think the opioid crisis and the structural inefficiencies of the healthcare
system are 2 separate (but related) problems that both need solving.

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vikramkr
They definitely are, but I'm replying to the idea that the drop in life
expectancy is because of inefficiencies - the us system has always been pretty
inefficient and nothing there has changed in a way that would trigger a
decrease in expectancy as far as I know. This current decrease in life
expectancy seems to be linked to the ongoing opiod crisis, not a sudden
decrease in health delivery efficiency

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awakeasleep
The number of uninsured people has been climbing the past few years and the
expense of healthcare has continued to grow in relation to inflation.

Those are two factors that drive down life expectancy

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WillPostForFood
Life expectancy started to drop in 2015, right as the uninsured rate reached
its all-time low. They numbers don’t correlate. It might track to the
increased cost of coverage and care, but not the uninsured rate.

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brightball
Honestly, I'm happier to see an article talking about efficiency problems
rather than just how to pay for it. I'd much rather our efforts on healthcare
reform revolve around fixing the problems than paying for them.

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mcv
They're related. The way healthcare is paid causes inefficiencies. If you
first need to check whether a patient is insured, and how they're insured,
before you can start saving their life, that can cost valuable time and reduce
life expectancy.

But there's no single problem hampering US healthcare, and therefore there's
no single silver bullet that will fix it. Many healthcare systems have some
problems, but US health care has a lot, and many of them need to be fixed in
order to improve the situation.

But if I could point to a single underlying problem that causes many of the
other problems, it's that the system is primarily designed to make profit,
rather than to heal people.

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kirRoyale
Are you saying the people who manufacture/engineer drugs should work for free?

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black_puppydog
Looks like someone's allergic to commie talk, eh? Don't worry, that's not what
they're saying. All of the countries in that article do pay for healthcare.
It's just that the US pays an imperial shit-ton, and doesn't get all that much
for it. So no, not for for free. And the people _working_ in the sector should
probably make _more_ if anything. Just investors and CEOs might have to make
less to make this system resemble anything like the meritocracy that people
like to pretend it is.

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kaiju0
[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php)

Our number one reason for dying is heart disease. This tracks pretty well with
the obesity epidemic. Likely is one of the primary factors.

Drug epidemics, medical efficiency and others are much smaller factors.

We really need to sin tax food that hits our pleasure receptors. But mess with
a persons favorite food and watch what happens. Doubt there is the will to
move the needle in the right direction.

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pg_bot
Americans on average engage in riskier and unhealthier behaviors than people
in similarly developed countries. It is unfair to place the full blame on the
medical system for lower life spans when they are not causing them.

The people with the highest life expectancy in the world are Asian-Americans
living in NJ.

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SketchySeaBeast
> Americans on average engage in riskier and unhealthier behaviors than people
> in similarly developed countries. It is unfair to place the full blame on
> the medical system for lower life spans when they are not causing them.

Do you have numbers for these claims? What risk taking behaviour is the entire
US doing that other countries are not?

>The people with the highest life expectancy in the world are Asian-Americans
living in NJ.

And does that group represent the socio-economic gamut? While you're
correlating race, I wonder if it ends up being reducible to something like
"upper-middle class individuals who don't smoke or drink".

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pg_bot
Americans are far more obese than people in comparable countries. We also
drive a lot more than our counterparts. (Driving is likely the riskiest
activity you do every day)

That group represents about a million people but I don't have detailed enough
information to claim that it is not skewed.

[https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-
com...](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-comparing-
obesity-in-america-and-europe)

