A study released by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics shows that life expectancy in the U.S., while increasing, has rapidly fallen behind that of many other countries. People in 41 other countries now have longer life expectancies.

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Murray attibutes some of the lack of competiveness to the health insurance system, blaming many early deaths on people who died from treatable illnesses but who cannot get treatment because of lack of insurance. But he does hint at what is probably a more fundamental cause of America’s slip in life expectancy, which is the high rate of obesity. Another researcher puts it this way: “The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy,” said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. “We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times.”

Murray says that the debate about health insurance isn’t going to result in any improvements because there is more to it than that. He says “The starting point is the recognition that the U.S. does not have the best health care system. There are still an awful lot of people who think it does.”

That last statement is certainly true. But using life expectancy as the measure of a country’s health care quality is incomplete, perhaps even misleading, isn’t it? Consider a country where there is very little health care available to the average person but where the lifestyle is inherently healthy. Life expectancy would be long. There are also numerous countries where the public health care system is available to everyone but at a pretty basic level of quality, while private health care is outstanding but beyond the reach of the average citizen in terms of price. Life expectancy on average will be lower in those countries. But that sort of broad brush assessment isn’t useful to the individual.

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