Germans must do without those fancy MRI machines after all... oh wait they have those two. So what’s the catch? Maybe they have fewer people covered? No, not that either:
> Despite spending less per capita, Germany still manages to cover 100% of its population. In the United States, about 8.8% of the population remains uninsured, which equates to about 28 million people. Even more people are underinsured.
What they have less off is overhead. They do have a shortage of doctors, but not due to costs of becoming one - education is either free or nearly free (especially by US standards).
> Tuition loans of over $200,000 are not uncommon for students in the US after graduating from medical schools, which are often private institutions. In Germany, however, the vast majority of medical universities are tax-funded and, for this reason, free of tuition. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5617919/
So we probably have more than enough money in the system already to treat every single one of US citizen, maintain great care and not close local hospitals, but we are too busy allowing profits and helping doctors pay back mega education loans.
People in Roman empire lived until 90 just like us. For example Seneca de Elder was 92 when he died.
The reason why "life expectance" was 30 years was because child deaths, since that number is just an average.
If you have 2 people living in a country, one is 100, and the other is 0, and the child dies, life expectancy is 50.
not too bad.
Do you factor in:
- Famines?
- Wars?
- Being killed by bandits?
- Are you talking about the city of Rome? Italy? Gaul?
- Just rich people, or do you include folks like slaves?
- Etc.
If you're going to accuse me of giving bad information, you'll need to provide better information. And from there, you need to count on dubious records. I took my number from Crash Course history (the unit on the middle ages), but it meets what I'd previously read across multiple credible sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire....
This article is a summary of one random historian, Frier.
Probably better summary of evidence:
https://archive.org/details/demographyromans0000park/page/20...
"We have a single papyrus record of 122 individuals listed in a register of taxes. Of these 122, 85 have ages extant. ... only 8 are over the age of 49 years, and only 2 of those are over 54"
"average life expectance at age 15 range from 8.3 to 15.4 years."
Etc. There's a broad set of estimates, but the estimate of 50 years is simply not plausible, unless you're talking about the wealthy elite. Being poor in Rome sucked.
And with Rome, I guess that's usually the case.
I'll mention: For all the talk of infant mortality, most infant deaths in history weren't recorded. The figure everyone tosses around -- 28 years -- sort of already takes that into account.
I've given up on editing bad Wikipedia pages a long time ago.
The difference was that a random cut could turn into an infection and kill you. Hannibal lost vision in one eye due to an infection. Prior to antibiotics, you never knew if an infection would:
- Pass;
- Disable you; or
- Kill you
Same thing for a lot of other medical issues, as well as non-medical ones (such as a famine, bandits, or a random army passing through).
In the Roman Empire, people lived 30 years and died. Most were illiterate. As a society develops, and has more excess resources, allocating more and more of those resources on keeping people alive, healthy, and educated seems reasonable.
What's missing from the charts is quality. We spend a lot on healthcare, but we also now have multi-million-dollar MRIs machines and similar magic.