US life expectancy

Originally posted by Palynka
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying...

Canada - 5.3
US - 6.8

Plug birth age distribution of Canada into US, (call it US*) then US* -> 5.4
Plug birth age distribution of US into Canada, (call it C*) then C* -> 7.06

Is it C*>US and US*>Canada that's bothering you? This difference could be due to different mortality rates per age. It's po ...[text shortened]... latively better than Canada with teenage births and vice-versa, but they have more of them).

Ah wait, if Canada's health care is better for say older mothers, but worse for younger mothers, it could be possible.

Originally posted by zeeblebot
http://townhall.com/columnists/LarryElder/2009/06/25/45_million_americans_--_who_are_those_guys_part_2?page=2

...

Elder: Ezekiel Emanuel, a medical adviser to the President (and brother of Rahm, the chief of staff), once told me, "Life expectancy is one of the dumbest ways to measure the quality of a nation's health care." Quality of medical care do ...[text shortened]... uences of unhealthy lifestyles, keeping our ranking from being even lower.
...

Publications such as the NY Times can be very obtuse when doing so favors their world view.

If a 25 year old man dies of a gun shot wound who would have otherwise lived until age 75, that is 50 years of life lost. That has the same effect on a nations life expectancy of 50 people each living one year less.

If life expectancy in the US is a year or two less than some other country, personally I remain unconvinced it shows any evidence of a weakness in health care.

Cancer survival rates in the US are higher than anywhere. In my mind, that's a better indicator of health care strength than overall life expectancy, although it is not conclusive.