American Life Expectancy Is Lower Than Other Countries

The U.S. has a rigorous standard that produces a generally renowned group of doctors, nurses, and health professionals. We also invite the world’s most gifted and brightest students to practice medicine here. The medical industry as a whole has developed methods to fight off illnesses, cure diseases, and keep people healthy. This has increased the life expectancy of people throughout generations. Essentially, we pay doctors to keep us healthy and they have succeeded in that because we are living longer lives than in the past.

In 1990, the life expectancy was around 75 years old in America and it cost roughly $4,800 (inflation calculated for 2021) annually for a person’s health expenditure. This includes health services, family planning activities, nutrition activities and emergency aid. In the same year, it costed someone in Spain about $1,700/year to have an average life expectancy of 77 years old. So, people in Spain were paying almost $3k less and living 2 years longer. Hmm. Let's explore that a bit.

In 2015, Americans spent about $10,500/year for a life expectancy of 78.69 years old. The people of Spain spent $3,500/year for a life expectancy of 82.83 years old. The people of Sweden spent $6,000/year and had a life expectancy of 82.2 years old. And the longest living nation, Japan, spent about $4,700/year to have a life expectancy of 83.79 years old. The patterns are painfully clear.

For the past two decades, the U.S. spends the most per capita in health expenditures among all major 1^st world nations, but has a lower life expectancy than most 1^st world nations.

We are spending more on health, yet living shorter lives than people who are paying less for health in other countries. We have the top doctors of the world, the most open economy for science to thrive, and engineers that are producing technologies at exponential growth rates. Shouldn’t we have the highest life expectancy as well? The graphic below shows how the U.S. has increased the health expenditures of people but our life expectancy can’t break the 80 year mark like other countries.

EXAMPLE LAB: Click on Portugal (the lowest life expectancy in 1970) and the United States. Then click the Play icon to see how Portugal has exceeded the United States in life expectancy whilst keeping their health expenditure affordable from 1970 to 2015. Click this if you had trouble finding Portugal.

It’s estimated that the 2020 health expenditure reached $12,000 per person in the U.S. and our life expectancy decreased by 1 year to 77.8 years old (78.8 in 2019). That decrease is probably because of COVID but comparing to Spain, their life expectancy decreased by 0.13 year (1.5 months) to an estimated 83.48 years old (83.61 in 2019). Obviously these are estimates but we can look at the actual data from 1970-2015 in the graphic above to see the same trend. We're clearly doing something different and even though it is a few years difference on the scale we're speaking about, if we look on a microscopic scale this could be your life expectancy or someone in your family. Wouldn't you want yourself and them to live a longer healthier life?

There are many different ideas on how to "fix" healthcare and make it more affordable. I don’t know what the solution is for us to decrease our health expenditure, but what the data is showing us is that countries that are spending less money on their health have people who live longer. A huge contributor to their longer lives is a healthier diet and less stress. Americans have started to take a turn towards eating healthier and exercising more this past few years. We could hopefully see the results of that down the road.

As far as stress, we take on a huge burden when medical bills come in the mail. Stress contributes a great deal to someone's wellbeing and overall health. Stress can cause increased blood pressure, migraines, restlessness, mental episodes, and more. Sometimes insurances cover a portion of the bill or none at all. Rarely is the case that they will cover everything. In other countries, they don't stress about paying medical bills because most of the time, their health insurance costs are less or are free. Maybe it's time we take a page out of those countries' book and try to implement a different standard so that Americans, too, can live longer healthier lives.

- TBC

P.S. Let us know what you think is a good solution in the comments below. Also, look out for our flash sale on all our merchandise in the upcoming weeks.