Universal Care Produces Bigger Life Expectancy Improvement

In work done a year earlier than that I've been looking at recently, Gerard F. Anderson, Ph.D. and Patricia Markovich of Johns Hopkins, did more detailed analyses of mortality variances among nations for The Commonwealth Fund.  In the study, entitled Multinational Comparisons of Health System Data, 2008, the authors report the change in life expectancy at birth for the 20 year period 1986-2006.  For the period, covering nearly a generation, the United States showed the smallest improvement among the nine countries compared as you can see in this graph.  (Click to enlarge graph.)

In another look at relative change in life expectancy between countries, the authors looked at how life expectancy at age 65 has changed over the same 20 year period.  Here, the United States' relative position improves modestly, but still shows the eighth smallest change among nine nations for the period.  (Click to enlarge graph.)

These data support an argument in favor of health reform.  In nations which have universal coverage, life expectancies are generally longer than in the United States, as we saw here.  And, as noted today, progress in improving life expectancy has been better in countries with universal coverage than the progress made in the United States during the period from 1986 to 2006.  I expect that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will begin to bring some of these benefits to America, when the law takes full effect.