If you are going to get picky about data, shouldn’t you first think about terminology?

There is nothing (or at least very little) health and care about “health care”. And the dollar numbers are not “costs” but “prices”. Once you substitute “medical expenses” for “health care” and “prices” for “costs”, immediately there is an improvement as to how to look at this.

For example, my Blue Cross Blue Shield coverage helps me with my family’s medical expenses. The expenses are based on prices of goods & services.

So, you should still be left wondering about the relationship between longevity, modern medicine, and expenses.

Thanks for your article.

Healthy life expectancy (HALE) at birth (years) both sexes – http://www.who.int/whosis/indicators/compendium/2008/1hat

Interestingly, there’s little if any difference arising from the different OECD and WHO definitions of life expectancy.

http://jonudell.net/images/who-vs-oecd.png

Now I want to revisit the book and review the argument and supporting data.

If you include all the countries, of course, you reframe the question of the longevity implications of US healthcare. In a whole-world view, we’re near the top. In an advanced-industrial-democracies-only view, we’re middle of the road.

But I’m still left wondering about the relationship between longevity, health, and cost.

re the ranked data: This was in response to Hadley above. I just mean the points have been sorted by value along the x axis, then plotted above a label showing all of the actual values. There’s no meaningful scale, as there was in the first graph, which makes it harder to spot outliers.

re your second point, I must’ve misunderstood, I thought your third graph above was supposed to be the OECD vs OECD comparison, the others used mixed measures?

and finally re life expectancy… yes, which scale is used is highly contentious. Here in the UK this does come up in the debate every so often in a different context, as people generally want life-extending treatment no matter what the quality of that life would be; while NICE may recommend treatments based on quality-of-life adjusted outcomes.

Needless to say, politicians and journalists use different scales to suit the needs of their stories :(

…you can see this corresponds closely to Gelman’s graph.

Not sure what you mean by that. It’s just years of life expectancy.

Also, what OECD data set is this?

The one that was cited in the book — which I can’t find at the moment.

In any event, the point I’m making is that that the recent revisualizations of this stuff are all based on OECD data alone, so far as I can tell. But a comparison of OECD and WHO data invites a discussion of which definition of life expectancy is appropriate — and, so far as I’ve seen, that discussion hasn’t happened yet.

It’s also customary to put the (putative) response on the y axis, so the plots would be more natural with spending on the x and life-expectancy on the y.