Graphing The Cost of Health Care:
In all of the regressions, the slope of the line is 1.9 years per $1000 of spending, and the Y-intercept implies that we’d live to 73.5 without spending a dime. At the level of spending of the US, the relationships predict a life expectancy of 87.5 years.
The US still shows a dramatic divergence from the other countries, spending more than twice as much for a slightly below average life expectancy.
This supports my theory that the enormous jump in life expectancy in America in the past 100 years isn’t related to modern medicine. It’s because we cleaned our water, developed vaccines, and invented antibiotics. We saved the children, and now modern medicine is flailing around selling relative snake oil to now try and save the old people who’ve terrorized their bodies since surviving childhood.
Just wanted to remind us to put things in perspective…
