@jussipekonen ?
Welcome to the age of plunder, bluster, and empty rhetoric. In other words, to the Age of the Dumb. If you voted for him, you're responsible.
— Stephen King
@33mhz (i'm also upset about what the Trump administration may mean for the health of my friends and people i care a lot about, and their influence on AU)
@33mhz regarding things like factor analysis and looking at variables that correlate with outcomes, it is certainly possible to look at correlation statistically. It can be complicated but the data set is not so small that it's impossible to separate out some of these factors. It has been done.
@33mhz I've posted multiple counterexamples below to your hypothesis. It's a reasonable question to posit however it is not borne out by evidence. There are many things in the world that are true that are counter-intuitive.
Healthcare provision requires distribution and logistics and not just funding amount, however the biggest factor by far in distribution and logistics is socioeconomic and is about provision of public services. There are tonnes of public health literature and evidence about this.
I guess if I get strident about these arguments it's because not only is the evidence so compelling and convincing (and easily found online in the scientific literature), but it affects my patients when they try and restrict public funding, and it affects people I know personally.
Only today one of the doctors at my work, US trained, was talking about how it was affecting their close family member who is in the US. Their family is middle class, certainly not poor, and educated enough to navigate the system, and yet the impact of subspecialist treatment of chronic disease is disgustingly high (just think about how outpatient but lifesaving treatment that can cost sometimes >$20k/dose, with capricious insurance policies and restrictions on healthcare providers). My colleague says things like that severely impact on what treatment can be provided and so they would never return to th US. That would never happen here. And yet we're not all out of pocket a ridiculous amount, and our overall outcomes are good. I'm so glad I live here and not there.
@33mhz in addition, given the differences in healthcare models from state to state you could still compare single US states to Australia if you really wanted to compare population sizes. You would find the same thing.
Not to mention that a country like Japan 126m, one like Aus 20m, one like UK 70m and one like NZ 5m and one like Iceland 300k have comparable health outcomes and they are orders of magnitude difference in population size, population density and location
// @blumenkraft @keita @streakmachine @kdfrawg @dgold
@33mhz firstly, where is the evidence that population size is a correlate of health provision (something from the literature, not a hunch) and secondly, if you want to compare a country with a very large pop, look at Japan's outcomes, a country with 126 million people in it, with far better healthcare outcomes and actually even lower spending than Aus with even better outcomes.
// @blumenkraft @keita @streakmachine @33mhz @kdfrawg @dgold