Relentless Health Value

David Contorno the other day posted the life expectancy chart comparing the US to comparable countries. Spoiler alert: It’s horrifying. You see Japan; you see Switzerland, Israel, Spain, Italy … basically everybody else in a cluster of pretty darn vertical lines: increasing life expectancies year over year without much cost increase at all. And then—wow!—off to the right, all by itself, you see the USA, costing nearly double the worst of the other countries with a life expectancy that is years lower. We pay a whole lot, and despite all of the advances in medicine and how much we pay, we don’t seem to be getting the value for our dollar. We could dig into those poor outcomes that we pay for. If we were going to, I might mention our truly beyond-upsetting maternal mortality rates and also infant mortality rates, which are way above other comparable countries. We could talk about all of our issues with diabetes and obesity. But let’s save all that for another day and just take one example that is really the qu