Hacker News Reader

Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

Word. And remember, the OECD isn't "The US, France, Germany, and the UK."

This link is (on table 2) the PPP adjusted incomes for each decile of the OECD countries: http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/Additional%20tables.xlsx

The US median 1st decile hourly earnings are $7.40. Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Poland, the Slovak republic, and Spain are all below there.

Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK are above there.

So I don't think that poverty is causing the US to underperform compared to the OECD mean or median.

View on HN

I think a honest comparison should use something like the Big Mac index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index), but for healthcare.

If one does that I bet that first decile American scores way lower on the number of hours he can afford to spend in a hospital per year, or on the number of days he has to work for a visit to the dentist.

On the other hand, I think he will be able to buy more over the counter medicines.

Well, it's possible that I'm misinterpreting the parent commenter, but I don't think it's a very strong or interesting statement to say, "I think that lower healthcare outcomes are due to worse healthcare."

I assumed that when dewiz listed "poverty" in a group of confounding variables like "war" or "pollution" (which, by the way, is another thing that the US is probably not particularly bad about) in explaining lower life expectancies, he wasn't trying to use "poverty" as a proxy for "low access to healthcare," so much as something that independently worsens healthcare outcomes even controlling for healthcare access.

(And, by the way, while I don't think that it explains the difference in life expectancies raised by the parent article, I do agree with dewiz that poverty almost certainly has a negative effect on healthcare outcomes, even if you perfectly control for access to healthcare.)

> So I don't think that poverty is causing the US to underperform compared to the OECD mean or median.

There's a difference between "low earnings" and "poverty", the two are only equivalent in a system with no public support.

They are different even then. Earnings relate to poverty via the prices of goods. I'm don't know much about economy but after searching in wikipedia I think the term is called "purchasing power parity".

That's true, but the great-grandparent post was already talking about PPP-adjusted earnings, so that aspect was already addressed when I wrote the grandparent post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com