Comments on: Quickly Around the Blogs

By: rc

rc — Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:10:05 +0000

Life expectancy and national expenditures on health care: http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/scpo/exp-percap.gif http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/scpo/pct-gdp.gif

By: Jeremy Pierce

Jeremy Pierce — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 17:41:38 +0000

Bad Jim, you completely missed the point of the exercise. It’s not about which death is worse for society. It’s about which death is worse for the person being killed.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 09:26:35 +0000

Perhaps if the humans in question in Ben Bradley’s dilemma were female, it would be easier: less was invested in the kid, and the old folks are dispensible. Let’s keep the breeder for the sake of propagating the human race. Clearly we need to keep at least one young man around, but the survival of the species in the face of millenia of warfare has proven that we don’t need all that many.

By: Peggy

Peggy — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 23:54:33 +0000

That paper actually says very little about health care outcomes. Mothers dying in childbirth; babies dying of preventable diseases; middle-aged people dying of cancers that could have been cured if caught earlier; older people rotting away from the gangrene of undertreated diabetes; all of those deaths add up to the lost lives that make up the USA’s miserable mortality statistics. After all what does death have to do with health care outcomes? http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5036a2.htm

By: Jake McGuire

Jake McGuire — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:25:36 +0000

That paper actually says very little about health care outcomes. It says that the US does poorly on infant mortality and life expectancy. It does point out potential confounding factors for life expectancy (violence, tobacco-related illnesses, coronary heart disease due to obesity, etc). It doesn’t point out possible confounding factors for infant mortality (i.e. that the US does better if you include perinatal deaths). It also doesn’t point out that Americans claim to be much more satisfied with their own health care than with the overall health care system, and only report the latter number. It does, however, point out that the US is ranked number one in responsiveness of health care.