I have often complained that reliance on the gross life expectancy numbers in the health care debate can be misleading. Life expectancy is a function of a number of variables of which health care is but one (in fact we could even break health care down into several variables such as access to care, quality of care, etc.). Greg Mankiw has found an interesting blog post at Carpe Diem that looks at actual life expectancies and standardized life expectancies (i.e. corrects for non-health care deaths such as homicides and car accidents).
Now the study in question is not much more than a presentation, so take the above numbers with a grain of salt. However, the study is asking the right question: if we control for things like homicides, car accidents and other forms of non-health care related premature deaths how does the U.S. life expectancy rank?
