Maggie's Farm

The entire story around our health outcomes are a classic example of how statistics lie and obfuscate. If you throw out the outliers; tiny countries and countries where good data doesn't exist or their government intentionally misrepresented the data to make them look better you are left with a couple of countries that have good health outcomes to compare with the U.S. Most notably Japan and you could even include Canada although the sample size is so much smaller. First it is important to point out that the differences between those countries that statistically have good health outcomes is tiny when compared with the U.S. But that aside in Japan senior citizens live longer. So why? Better health care, better genes, why? Most probably because of cultural differences in that Japanese elders are revered and generally are cared for by their children and this is a better system then nursing homes. Simple as that.

But the real issue is a statistical anomaly where the U.S. has millions and millions of people living here who grew up in 3rd world countries and have health issues that were contracted in childhood. Also the U.S. is a diverse country with 10's of millions of people from races/ethnicities that have genetic health issues that have very little to do with good or bad health care. If Japan or Canada had these diverse communities their outcomes would be worse than ours. In fact these studies have been do where the U.S. population was evaluated but leaving out a handful of major cities with large ethnic populations and the result is that the U.S. outcomes are better than Japan and Canada.

I believe that what is really going on is that special interest groups who want to increase funding or change specific emphasis in health care are using these inaccurate statistical studies to push for changes that won't make our health care better but will satisfy certain agendas. Just the old fashioned misinformation campaign to extract goodies for one group at the expense of another group.