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Comment by personomas | Hacker News Reader

EU health care is horrible - absolutely horrendous. It's very difficult for a young, working individual to get quality health care in a reasonable time - actually, almost impossible. I would definitely rather take the US health care situation over EU health care. Doctors are muchmore competant in the US, and they are much more likely to go out of their way to help you. One reason surely because EU doctors are unbelievably overwhelmed, working in health care in the EU must be really really horrible.

In my opinion, if the EU social benefits are even a little bit better than in the US, it's definitely because of other factors, not at all because of health care.

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That’s an odd choice because the US lags Europe in life expectancy, except for in states like CA, which as we’re discussing has just as high a cost but with increased uncertainty.

It's a minor difference (3 years), there are a lot of other reasons that can contribute to difference in life expectancy than health care. Europe is very much, you know, don't do anything, sit at a home all days. Americans are more likely to live their life and get out - which comes with obvious danger, but at least Americans might experience life!

How much is a year of your life worth? A few thousand in taxes a year? The US left expectancy has also been going down even after the worse of Covid while the EU is returning to a slow upward trend.

It’s also that if you lose you’re job you immediately have to think about where you are going to get your healthcare from and changing a lot of paperwork or even providers.

The point is that you can't draw conclusions of quality of health care simply based of one statistic. There so many other reasons to cause difference in life expectancy.

> The US left expectancy has also been going down even after the worse of Covid while the EU is returning to a slow upward trend.

This is complete meaningless non-sense. You can't draw trends from this. And it's not relevant to the discussion anyways!

> It’s also that if you lose you’re job you immediately have to think about where you are going to get your healthcare from and changing a lot of paperwork or even providers.

You think you have lots of paperwork in the US?? Come to Europe man.

Obesity rate in the US is double the EU's. There's no way to overcome that.

That's based on our life habits, not on health care. That's crazy talk.

Right, our life expectancy is shorter because of life choices, so it can't tell us anything about healthcare quality.

Lack of accessible healthcare and medical bankruptcy as one of the primary drivers of financial failure and old age poverty is not life choices.

Gun death as a leading cause of youth deaths is not life choices.

PFAS exposure is not life choices.

A medical system that allows advertisement and more or less open bribery leading to an opioid crisis that’s killing enough people to bring down life expectancy across the midwest is not life choices.

Ineffective pandemic management by the government is not a life choice.

Obesity is a boogeyman, but it has been around for long enough that the recent significant drops in life expectancy cannot be blamed on it. And even obesity is likely not a pure life choice, food quality and regulation of food supply play a vital role.

I always found it amusing that we pump estrogen / hormone affecting chemicals into things and then give people a hard time if they have gender identity challenges and call it a life choice despite all the science to the contrary.

Life choices are a catch all diversion, a fairy tale people tell themselves to feel like they have power to avoid the horror.

Many of these are actually life choices. American addiction to guns tells us nothing about healthcare quality. Either way, I'm not saying our healthcare quality is better than other countries, I'm just saying you can't say it's worse by just looking at life expectancy because of confounders.

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