At birth, Hispanics can expect to live 80.6 years; that’s about 2.5 years longer than the non-Hispanic white population and about 7.7 years longer than blacks. Overall, the life expectancy for the total population was 77.7 years, according to 2006 data used in a report issued Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.The longer lifespan is apparent despite well-documented health risks for Hispanics, including higher rates of obesity and diabetes and lower levels of education, income and access to health care, say researchers who have been puzzling over what’s known as “the Hispanic paradox” for years.
So… what does this mean? I have no friggin idea. But my point in bringing it up is we often read about life expectancy, infant mortality and other health metrics of the US vs. other nations and from those single data-points we jump to conclusions about our healthcare system. Maybe what this single datapoint shows is we have a very complex system of varying diets, varying lifestyles and maybe trumping all, varying genetics.
One might assume that all Americans living in the US would have similar health outcomes, with maybe the snarky remarks of some concluding the very rich having the best of all health outcomes. But this study agrees with many other previous studies that US Hispanics outlive both whites and blacks. In fact, it also finds that they live longer even though they have HIGHER level of obesity, poverty and diabetes.
Nearly 29 percent of Hispanics are obese, compared with nearly 24 percent of whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 10 percent of Hispanics are diabetic, compared with just under 8 percent of the total population, according to the National Institutes of Health. Some 25 percent of Hispanics families lived below the poverty level in 2009, compared with 14 percent of U.S. families overall, according to new census figures.
So, maybe we should be more careful before we point to statistics coming out comparing country X’s level of any medically relevant condition compared to the USA’s since the answer to fixing it may be genetic vs. systemic (heathcare) or based on something else other than healthcare.
…to address the issue.
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p>For my part, my working hypothesis is that diet may be a factor here.
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p>That said, I don’t believe that the mix of guild socialism and oligarchic corporate welfare masquerading as “market” healthcare in the United States functions efficiently or equitably, and this is reflected to an extent in comparative mortality rates.
If there was a country (we’ll call Hispania) which was populated by the US Hispanics in this study and they showed a longer life expectancy than our country, many people (maybe here) would be asking why we couldn’t copy Hispania’s healthcare system in order to get the same results. Which we could easily do since US Hispanics use “our” system already.
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p>The other point was we hear about early intervention being a huge cost savings for Obamacare since everyone will be covered but the US Hispanics observed in this study were overweight, diabetic and living in poverty (at higher rates than whites) so would early intervention change any of their outcomes?
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p>AS I said above, I cannot explain why this is happening (nor can anyone as far as I an tell) but it should give people pause before they quote a situation in another country and compare it to ours and blame our healthcare system, maybe we have sucky genes as a nation!
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p>The chart below may show the US with infant mortality rates worse than Cuba but I don’t see people getting on planes to go to any of these countries to have their babies. Because your chances of having your baby survive due to healthcare are higher in the US (IMO). There are so many variables… and even this chart (from 2005) shows the US with 6.9 deaths per thousand but in MA we are closer to 5.0. Move 1,000 pregnant woman to Singapore and bring 1,000 pregnant Singapore women here and monitor their infant mortality rates. I’ll bet dinner that they will be consistent with their country of origin and not where the birth occurs.
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p>Without examining the real reasons for outcomes it is absurd to take a statistic and deduce something. The subject of this diary proves this. The US Hispanics are eating the same food as we do, breathing our air, seeing our doctors, taking the same medicines… and we get differing results.
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