Let me suggest something different from your views. Put everyone in the risk pool: old, young, male, female. The young support the old, the rich support the poor, this minimizes annual risk and medical expense. It’s basically fair, and ALL our industrial peers have some version of this. Our peers live longer and have better infant mortailty than we. Just consider that, please.

If you love our great country, consider threats to our democracy. I think the REAL THREAT to our nation are the scumbag lobbyists and corporations that are buying the votes of our Congress to get laws that make them richer, while robbing average Americans.

The health sector has spent millions on “campaign contributions”. If you think lawmakers care about you over the lobbyist scumbags, I think you are wrong, that is, unless you are one of those lobbyist scumbags.

Have a great day.

But obviously health care is only one of many influences on life expectancy (which continues to rise here). Diet plays a large role; Americans tend to carry around more extra pounds. Economists Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider point out that relatively high rates of car crashes and homicides depress U.S. life expectancy. By Quillen’s logic, politicized medicine can also cure risky driving.

The U.S. beats France hands down when it comes to cancer survival or access to health technology.

As Sally Pipes and others point out, infant mortality is recorded differently in France than it is in the U.S. Here an infant with “any sign of life” that then dies counts as an infant mortality. France adds a viability standard, so the same infant that counts as an “infant mortality” in the U.S. may count as a stillbirth in France. Ronald Baily adds that more infants tend to be born underweight in the U.S. because more teens have children here.

For references, see his original post on longevity and infant mortality, as he links them.

Re. “lobbyist scumbags,” are those who lobby for what you like “non-scumbag lobbyists”? In any case, I think the insurance companies are among the lobbyists who get political favoritism at citizens’ expense. Insurers do not want a free-market in insurance, as they’d have to compete more, as described here.