[quote=harvey][quote=CA renter]There is too much information in her video to type in just a few lines here.[/quote]
I asked for a examples, a few sentences, far less than you actually typed.
Healthcare is not simply more expensive today, it is very different today. By the most basic metric, life expectancy, healthcare is significantly better.
If healthcare is worse for the middle class, then why is everybody living longer?
Real estate costs more because there are more people and the same amount of land. Why is it so hard to understand that?
I’m aware of the “wealth gap” statistics, but don’t see how that translates into the claim that the middle class is worse off than they were forty years ago.
If the middle class is really so much worse off, there should be an abundance of examples of things that are no longer accessible to them. And yet you cannot provide even a few examples to support your claim.[/quote]
Stop being lazy and watch the video.
FYI, the biggest improvements in life expectancy happened at the younger end of the age range over 50 years ago with improvements in sanitation, hygiene, medically supervised pregnancy and childbirth (including more births in hospitals), vaccines, antibiotics, and safer workplaces (thanks to unions and govt regulations). Over the past ~40-65 years, we have only gained a few years of life expectancy for people at age 65 (somewhere between approximately 2 and 7.5 years, depending on which research you look at, the timeframe, and gender differences). Contrary to popular myth, we are not living that much longer than we were 40-65 years ago.
—–
[bold is mine -CAR]
Gains
since the 1980s were 6 years in Japan and 5 years in France
and Italy, as opposed to 3 years in the Netherlands and 2
years in the United States and Denmark.
There are no population-based data to allow a direct estimate of the contributions of medical care to life extension or to the quality of life. In the absence of such data, my colleagues and I have created inventories of the outcome benefits of the preventive or curative care for individual conditions. Based on such an inventory of established life extending outcomes of preventive and curative services for individual conditions, I estimate that about half of the 7½ years of increased life expectancy since 1950 can be attributed to medical care. I credit an even larger number of years of relief, or partial relief, of poor quality of life to medical care. The data on which the estimates are based are often incomplete, and the estimates are approximations. They are more than speculative and less than precise.
[The U.S. is lagging other developed nations. -CAR]
Life expectancy has improved steadily and substantially in most high-income countries over the last century. In recent decades, however, the United States, Denmark, and the Netherlands have seen gains in life expectancy stagnate (NRC 2010: Glei, Meslé, and Vallin). U.S. life expectancy has been rising at a slower pace than other high-income countries over the last 25 years, particularly for women.
Denmark experienced virtually no growth in life expectancy from 1980 to 1995. The Netherlands experienced stagnation in the rate of growth in life expectancy starting in the early 1980s and continuing until 2002. While increases
in life expectancy in Denmark and the Netherlands have resumed, the growth rate of U.S. life expectancy remains exceptionally slow.
Again, if you want to compare the quality of medical care today to that of 40+ years ago, you have to look at all aspects of medical care, and that includes the HUGE burden that has been shifted from hospitals and medical professionals to family members and other caretakers.
