[Harmon]

Originally Posted by netseeker

I wonder how you could substantiate this allegation. .

Mainly common sense and observation, plus paying attention to what I read about the subject over time. For example, the single most important thing that government does in enhancing longevity is building and maintaining public sanitation systems. Sewer systems, garbage collection, and providing clean water. Note: that's not health care.

The following graph comes from the "Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Enviroment and Energy". They use longlivety as one logical interlinkage indicator between social (eg. healthcare) and economic (eg. growth rate) indicators.



The full essay ("Sustainability indicators - A compass on the Road Towards Sustainability") is available at: http://www.wupperinst.org/de/publika...itrag/WP81.pdf.

Now you might wonder why a well known scientific institute can be so ignorant and dumb to think healthcare could have something to do with longlivety...

The paper you cite is not about health care and longevity. It is about economic sustainability and profitability in developing countries. It's DRMed (evil! evil!) so I can't copy & paste portions of it for the "fair use" of mocking its virtually impenetrable jargon. Damn near put me to sleep.

It has one paragraph mentioning health care as one of several factors impacting longevity in developing countries. (In developing countries, health care is important in connection with infant mortality.) Bottom line - red herring.

There's no question that in particular instances, specific health care has something to do with whether specific people survive & get some longevity (although I like your coinage, "longlivety." My mother died of cancer at 45. These days, she would probably have survived it, and lived to 68, like her mother (overweight, died of a heart attack) or 75 (father, suicide from depression.) These days, he probably would have been treated for it.

But overall, once you get past infant mortality, longevity is not what health care is about, till the last six months of life - which has very little impact on computing longevity. No matter how much money you spend, you can't substitute health care for good genes. And most people don't die young, or even in middle age, from dread disease. It's accidents that do them in. Believe me - when you hit my age, you pay attention to the obituaries.

I said it before - health care is implicated in longevity at the margins. In Europe, Canada, America, Austrialia, & New Zealand, health care is about quality of life, not length of life.