> The point is that we spend a shitload of money on health care,
> far more than anyone else in the world, and end up with fairly
> mediocre outcomes. It may be because so many of us are fat and
> sedentary. It may be that we have so many poor people. It may
> be that our diet sucks. It may be alienation and stress. It may
> be all those things.
Add to your list of reasons why this could be so: "because we can" -- how much of the "shitload" of money that gets spent on "health care" in the US would you say is, well, optional? Is it easier or harder to get discretionary health care (if you [and your insurance company] can afford it) in the US than in, say, Canada? At the other end of the spectrum, how much of these costs are for extreme care? Here's an interesting statistic, I doubt it's anomolous: In Tennessee's "TennCare" Medicare program, about 150,000 of the 1.3M covered people account for the majority of the spending -- and they have 5 or more simultaneous chronic illnesses.
Statistics hobbyists out there: let's wake up. There's no good reason to point out that the US "spends more money on health care" than, say, Canada. Because there's not much in the way of "average care" being consumed in the health care market, there's not much point in talking about what an "average consumer spends" (or has spent for her).
Being sick is not an equal opportunity employer; talking about averages is dumb.
/jordan