We get a lot more care, pay higher rates, and have worse outcomes.
That last bit is why people are pissed.
Life expectancy in general in the US could also be due to the amount of gun violence, as well. Nothing to do with the quality of healthcare.
The US government does not care that much about obesity, gun violence and all that jazz because it is not the one paying for the damages it does.
All these factors contribute to the comparatively poorer life expectancy of Americans, which is, I agree, only a surface metric.
The fact that Americans intuit that it’s not is a worrying sign of just how broken our system is
One of the strongest levers we have to improve the “inputs” you’re describing is a better primary care system. America’s has been absolutely gutted over the last 20 years by interactions of various economic and regulatory dynamics including (notably) the anti-competitive vertical integration of pay-viders and pay-vider+PBMs like UnitedHealth Group.
It is absolutely not true there aren’t system-level changes we can make in healthcare and insurance to help address this.
Having access to doctors helps to manage disease.
Obesity is a disease.
In particular, having access to PCPs helps to manage obesity.
Our healthcare system yields poor access to healthcare.
In particular, it yields poor access to PCPs.
Ergo the obese population is in part an output of and not an external input into the design of our healthcare system.
Ergo changes to the healthcare system absolutely can — and in fact should have as a key goal to — yield changes to levels of obesity.
> “ Rearrange healthcare/government insurance models all you want; it can't fix that.”
This claim is false. The mental model of an obese population being exclusively an input into our healthcare system does not track with what we know about the relationship between healthcare and obesity.
But hey, it's not like the US is a democracy exactly given that public opinion generally doesn't translate into policy changes anymore.
