Par for the course for O'Reilly. I guess GWB isn't the biggest retard to get a graduate degree from Harvard . . .
Canada's life expectancy is 3.8% higher than the US's...this isn't that much, especially when you take into account that Canada has 2.3% more Whites than the US and the US has 5.7 times more Blacks than Canada. African-American life expectancy, for a variety of reasons..major ones being homicide, infant mortality rates and AIDS.., is age 70.2 (67.1 for males, 74 for females) compared to the 78.1 population average. This drags down the US's average as a whole. This trend tends to bear out when you analyze the US regionally and compare demographics even in our own country. District of Columbia: 56% of the population is Black,the highest "in" the US. Life Expectancy: 72.0, the lowest in the country. Mississippi: 38% of the population is Black, highest of the "proper" states. Life Expectancy: 73.6 Louisiana: 32%. LE: 74.2 So, it isn't so much the health care system as it is demographics and the behaviors/problems of said demographics. What we need is more Asian women and their 85.7 year life expectancy numbers to balance it out.
^ Do you happen to know the life expectancy for U.S. vs. Canadian whites, U.S. vs. Canadian blacks, etc?
Now see this is actually a good point and addresses why life expectancy shouldn't be the ultimate determining factor in figuring out which health care system provides better results. We didn't get anything approaching that level of intelligence from O'Reilly.
One of the other problems with statistics is that not every country figures them the same way. There are countries that don't count infants who are born alive but die soon after as "deaths"...the USA always does as our hospitals will do everything they can to save such children. The US infant mortality rate looks artificially high because of it. We also have the legal/illegal immigrant issue..one that Canada does not have anywhere near to the extent we do. They bring the US average down as well. Truthfully, other countries wouldn't be sending their patients here for extraordinary care if our system was worse than theirs. That makesno sense. They would save money and do it themselves.
I've seen this claim made fairly often but haven't seen anything suggesting it's anymore than a gross exaggeration. Would you happen to have anything that supports this assertion?
Since we are talking about Canada, I will use them as an example from one of their own government sites: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2231416
