More Data on "Your Money AND your Life"
Post #497
If you pay someone more and more money over time, but get less and less in return from them, that’s a hint that you might be dealing with criminals — people interested in taking away from you everything which they can get away with.
In this prior substack essay, a disparity was found between what US citizens pay for healthcare and the life expectancy that the have. It showed that, prior to COVID, Americans were getting the short end of the stick, almost as if they had been conned.
Updated evidence from the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker reveals the situation worsening over time, just as would be the case if actually dealing with criminals:
The blue dots are the average of 11 comparable nations to the USA: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, UK. At very bottom left is that average in the year of 1980. The blue dot farthest to the right, showing a life expectancy of over 82 years, is that same average in the year of 2021.
The logarithmic model (blue trend line) almost perfectly models their values over time, with an R-squared value of 0.9921.
But, besides 1980, 1981, and 1982 (first 3 orange dots at bottom left), the USA is an exception to the model, indicating that some confounding variable is increasingly in play. One hypothesis is that the U.S. medical system has become overtaken by organized criminals interested in keeping Americans sick, so as to profit off of it.
Something happened in the USA after 1982, and got worse and worse over time.
The steep drop at far right — where the last 3 orange dots are 2019, 2020, and 2021 — provides further evidence that there is a conflict of interest which has corrupted U.S. medical care, rather than the change being due to some random, accidental cause. The same steep drop isn’t found in comparable nations.
Here is the same graph without the notes in it:
Corruption is something which can be rooted out when it is a small fraction of the total. As an illustrative example, if just 1% of an organization took bribes from China so as to act against American interests, then that 1% could likely be rooted out.
But if 70% of the individuals in a given organization are “on the take” — i.e., more than two bad guys for every good guy — then it will prove impossible to root out the corruption in it. Efforts at reform will consistently get stymied by the guilty parties.
Simple Analogy on the impossibility of Reform
If two people are taking turns building with blocks, but the second one of them gets to move or place twice as many blocks as the first person, then that first person will never get to build anything which stays in place. As soon as the beginning or base of a tower is made, the second person can undercut everything that the first person planned.
In other words, no lasting change (from what that second person wants) is possible.
For the same reason, after corruption begins to include most participants in any social organization, reform becomes impossible. The only way forward is to terminate the institution, or at least withdraw all monetary and non-monetary support for it, so as to let it self-implode.
Reference
[life expectancy vs. $ spent on healthcare] — How does U.S. life expectancy compare to other countries? (6 Dec 2022). Shameek Rakshit, Matthew McGough, Krutika Amin Twitter, and Cynthia Cox. Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. Available at: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries