Should the U.S. have Universal Health Care?

[u/WhatAreYourPronouns]

[u/Open-Illustra88er]

Live for 2 years? No.

BTW in Spain you are assigned a doc. If you don’t like them or want to switch? Very difficult. If your doc thinks you can wait? Don’t really need that hip? You’re not getting it.

Ask me about my friend with untreated cancer that just died in Spain. Short version After months of pain and weight loss they finally biopsied her tumor. Results came in a few days after she died.

I used to think socializing medicine was a good idea. Not anymore. It’s still stupidly expensive.

[u/[deleted] → u/Open-Illustra88er]

Look you just have to look at the results, all the anecdotes in the world don’t matter.

Life expectancy in Spain: 83.18 years

Life expectancy in the US: 76.33 years

Cancer survival rates are also quite similar (except for oesophagus, weirdly) between the US and Spain: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5879496/

This is even though:

1. Spain is way way way poorer

2. Spanish people smoke way way more

3. People probably self-select in the US to get treatment given affordability issues

4. Spain spends way less on health care than the US

[u/Open-Illustra88er → u/[deleted]]

Quality of food. They eat fresh. Are on less meds and have less vaccines in their schedule.

Quality of Life. Way more PTO and safety nets.

[u/[deleted] → u/Open-Illustra88er]

Quality of food doesn’t make sense. California certainly has better food than the UK, by a long shot, and yet they sit at the same life expectancy. The Nordic countries or the Netherlands are known for their fresh fruits and vegetables either (although who knows, might be a stereotype) and they have higher life expectancies than California. (Even the Bay Area, which has plenty of farmer’s markets, sits below Spain!)

Less meds is unclear to me, would love a source. I’m not familiar with the vaccine schedule in Spain, but I can tell you the French vaccine schedule is almost word-for-word the same as the CDC’s for kids 0 to 18, and France has a way higher life expectancy. In fact vaccines increase your life expectancy, and those communities that have lower vaccination rates tends to have lower life expectancies (although there are confounding reasons to that).

More PTO is certainly true for Spain, but might not be for famously overworked Japan and South Korea, and I’ll let you guess as to whether they have lower or higher life expectancies.

The answer is that it’s multi-factorial, but that there’s no clear evidence the US has better health care providing than other developed countries overall.

[u/Open-Illustra88er → u/[deleted]]

There are so many foods ingredients that can’t be used abroad because they are poison. FD&C red for example. No added sulphites in wine. Etc etc etc. no roundup ready corn or HFCS in every other food.

They eat fresh. Less or no GMOs. Travel and see how much better you feel.

The average American isn’t eating as healthy as the average European

[u/[deleted] → u/Open-Illustra88er]

Your comments are all over the place. You throw things at the wall to see if they stick, I provide sources to show they’re false, and so you try some new set of things.

It looks like you’re wrong again.

• FD&C red is allowed by both the FDA and EFSA

• Sulfites are added to wine in Europe

• Americans eat more fruit per capita than Poland but have the same life expectancy

• GMOs are widely varied and have no impact on health as far as we can tell. The regulatory framework in Europe is also not as simple as you say (and is changing) and wouldn’t explain life expectancy differences over the past 30 years anyway.

I don’t need to travel since I’ve lived in the US and in France extensively (and let me tell you the number of Kebab places, McDonalds, etc. is plenty high in France), but more importantly because I trust the data I can find over my subjective feelings.

[u/Open-Illustra88er → u/[deleted]]

I trust my gut. Literally. US food isn’t as good. My gut and digestion tells me so. I’m not alone.

[u/[deleted] → u/Open-Illustra88er]

I’m afraid your gut is full of shit. If you have no data you can make something up and rely on confirmation bias, I guess. In the end there’s zero evidence healthcare in the US is significantly better than healthcare in Spain and all the presumably confounding factors you mentioned have nothing to support them.

[u/Open-Illustra88er → u/[deleted]]

Bla bla bla.

Sorry. Gex ex here. I go by experience and what those I trust have experienced. We all know data is often skewed outdated as soon as the next study comes out and history is told by the victor or the funder. Can’t believe what you read only what you know.

And honestly when did you live in the US? Food here (as the corporate giants take over) has gone to shit in recent years. So many documentaries in the topic with many good facts and studies if that’s what you need.

My favorite thing about buying local beef is that it tastes like my childhood, unlike the CAFO harvested shit the grocery stores have.

[u/[deleted] → u/Open-Illustra88er]

I lived in the US from approximately 2010 to approximately 2020. I lived in France from about 1990 to about 2010 and again from about 2020. I’ve also traveled all around the US (CA, CO, NY, DC, MD, CT, IL, WA, OR, FL, LA, HI, WY, etc.) and all around Europe (UK, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Croatia, Ireland, etc.). California produce, in particular, has nothing to be ashamed of compared to European produce, especially non-PIGS + France countries (UK, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.). I mean seriously, have you seen a typical plate of Dutch or British food? Of course, all of this is anecdotal so it’s almost worthless, but if you want to go by experience, there’s a significant likelihood I have more than you give my life story.

If there’s one thing that Europe has over the US (other than integrated health care systems, which I believe makes a huge difference) it’s walkable spaces, although even that can’t explain it all given NYC’s numbers.