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Life Expectancy vs. Healthcare Costs in the U.S.
There are hundreds of metrics we could use to gauge how well the U.S. healthcare system performs. Let’s focus today on two of the biggest-picture measuring sticks — life expectancy and total amount paid per person for healthcare.
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Individual hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies all have their own ways to see how they are doing. Some metrics are high level, and some are way down in the weeds.
For this column, it’s all about country-level, policy-level metrics. The kinds of measuring sticks that we can use to compare things country-to-country.
1. Life Expectancy
Imagine for a moment that your mom or dad passed away last month.
How much would it mean for you to have one extra day with your parent now?
What if you could have an extra 2000 days with your parent?
(Yes, I know — that’s an oddly specific number of days to ask you about. You’ll understand why in about 20 seconds.)
If you compare the average Japanese person with the average American person, the Japanese citizen gets those extra 2000 days with their parents.
We Americans do not.
- In 2019, life expectancy in the U.S. was 76.3 years for the average man and 81.4 years for the average woman.
- In 2019, life expectancy in Japan was 81.4 years for the average man and 87.4 years for the average woman.
- That means that life expectancy for Japanese women…
