Why Americans are dying earlier than their international peers
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/09/health/international-health-report/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1
I am almost interested in digging up the report to read the details. It is well known (among people who bother with facts) that the US pays the most for health care and (compared with its peers) has the worst outcome. Add to that juicy fact that our health care costs _continue_ to grow much faster than inflation and you have a recipe for a bunch of sick people paying their very last cent to get sicker and die after treatment. We aren’t that far from that point already when a respected medico-scientific panel states that there is actually a societal health detriment to the use of PSA screens and mammograms only to be completely ignored. Personally, beyond the obvious lack of universal health care, I point the most proximal cause for this phenomenon at our massively for-profit health care system starting with the huge pharmaceutical companies (that have bigger budgets for advertising than they do for R&D). Yes, to a certain extent having a for-profit system gets some research done more quickly than might happen in a not-for-profit paradigm, but to me the cost of the system, that our for-profit system pushes useless (or worse!) medicine (no different than witch doctors in many respects), outweighs the occasional benefits. One of the reasons why science and medicine jobs pay less than what I get in the infosec community (half or so (this doesn’t include doctors, naturally)) is because many people who get in the ‘biz are doing it because they love it and almost any pay is good enough. Ergo, the exact same work could get done for much less. The big company CEOs, of course, don’t make do with such paltry paychecks, but take a step down from the C-Suite to where the work is done and there is a dramatic decrease in take-home pay (of course, that is true for purt near our entire dysfunctional ‘capitalistic’ (oligarchical, really, and far from the same thing) society). Anyway, the huge cost of medicine isn’t because it costs a lot to provide good health care but because we as a society have bought into the notion that it is somehow necessary to pay outlandish profits (many on-patent drugs have 99.9% profit margins (meaning if you spend $100 on the drug it cost the company 10 cents to produce it (yes, I know they have to recover their R&D costs, but I have explored that math as well))), much of which is directed to very few people at the top (and some diverted to actual stock holders, but that is increasingly decreasing; why doesn’t the Tea Party bitch about that?). Anyway, this report is no shock or surprise to me, but I guarantee that nothing will change here and in another decade an identical report will be produced likely outlining an even worse dichotomy.
Just like the dot-com crash as well as the popping of the housing bubble, the crash of our society is easy to predict in general, but impossible to predict specifically. It is time to make arrangements to emigrate!
