
Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index – 2019 edition - gfiorav
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/spain-tops-italy-as-world-s-healthiest-nation-while-u-s-slips
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JaumeGreen
> "Primary care is essentially provided by public providers, specialized
> family doctors and staff nurses, who provide preventive services to
> children, women and elderly patients, and acute and chronic care,"

The public healthcare here in Spain has an endemic problem of ever reducing
budgets, and it's so saturated (because of that) that most people that can
also get private healthcare. When politicians touch that is to reduce the
budget even further.

Yet people think that the main problems in Spain are other things... damn the
propaganda machine.

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nairboon
So what are the main problems in Spain, according to what most people think?
(I'm not very familiar with Spain)

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adrinavarro
National politics (Catalonia, etc). But there's also an endemic issue with
spending on unnecessary infrastructure while underfunding heavily used
infrastructure (such as public transportation in large cities); our budgets
never seem to be able to reduce debt, and our pension system is doomed to
explode, because eventually there will be more retired than working people.

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collyw
Given that the life expectancy is so high maybe it makes sense to raise the
retirement age here by a few years more.

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bostonpete
Wow, that's surprising to me because of smoking alone. When I lived there
briefly in the early 90s, it seemed like everyone smoked. I wonder if that's
changed dramatically or is just drowned out by other metrics...

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lordnacho
This seems to have massively changed all over Europe. When I was a kid in the
90s you could go into bars that were foggy with smoke. TV characters would do
it.

Nowadays it's generally not cool anymore, it's seen as a vice and people will
sdmit so when they ask if it's okay.

~~~
close04
The laws changed and smoking inside public spaces was all but abolished. There
are still holdouts in the countries that passed these laws more recently but
the trend is clear and it's acceleration.

I also noticed that one big factor that actually worked in discouraging teens
from even starting is the "uncool" image built around smoking.

Unfortunately it look like the coolness factor is moving to electronic
cigarettes and there's not much data to discourage the use yet.

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samat
Love how 'click HERE' is not a link.

> To access the Bloomberg 2019 Healthiest Country Index data set for all
> nations, click HERE.

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olcor
The article seems to have been taken from the main Bloomberg site:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-24/spain-
top...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-24/spain-tops-italy-
as-world-s-healthiest-nation-while-u-s-slips)

The "click here" link is for terminal subscribers only so I guess Quint might
not have been able to resolve it properly.

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fedups
I'd be curious how individual US states stack up here--it seems like there
would be quite a bit of variance (and I'm sure the US isn't the only country
whose stats become much less informative when aggregated to a single number).

~~~
thinkcontext
[https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2017-an...](https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2017-annual-
report/findings-state-rankings)

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jug
Wow. Russia looks worse off than I thought. Congrats, you share Egyptian
health standards.

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eyebrowser95
I think Bloomberg did an oopsie..

