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⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 “What‘s going on with the spike in overdose, suicide, and alcohol-related swathes in White Americans without a college degree?” as answered by Princeton economists. I thought they perhaps over-interpreted some population survey data in the first part of the book, but the parts related to health care economics were compelling. A little academic, but also interesting and important.

This book was horribly boring to read, which is hard to achieve with such fascinating data and unique topics. Big take away- the American health care system and all its supporting components are largely to blame for the surge of deaths of despair, which disproportionately affect white Americans with no college degree. Fascinating topic, the last third of the book is good. 2/5 stars only because it‘s so hard to read for the first half of the book.

I don‘t agree with everything in this book and didn‘t like the way some things were spot lighted, though it did make many good points. I am not for capitalism but this is an interesting read.

American healthcare is the most expensive in the world, and yet American health is among the worst among rich countries.

We need Medicare for All. Healthcare is a human right!

Deaths by suicide and alcohol are rising among those who are finding work and family life increasingly difficult. Those deaths are being hastened by the costs of healthcare.

Americans spend vast sums on healthcare, and that spending affects almost every part of the economy. Healthcare is expensive everywhere, and it makes good sense for rich countries to spend a large share of what they have to extend their citizens‘ lives and to reduce pain and suffering. But America does this about as badly as it is possible to imagine. The American healthcare system is both absurd and oppressive.

Religious people do better in many ways: they are happier, more generous, and less likely to smoke, drink, or use drugs. Friends make a good life better, and friends from church do so by more than other friends.

🤔Excuse me, what the fuck is this? I‘m atheist and I‘m doing just fine thanks. So are my atheist friends. This is such bullshit, often these religious people have far less ‘morals‘ than those that are not. Look around.

Europe has a much more extensive safety net than does the US, including long-term payments for those without work and generous disability systems, especially for older workers. In spite of this, a larger fraction of people participates in the labor force in most other rich countries, including in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, with their famously generous benefit systems.

Hey America? Pay attention.

In America, money buys access to better healthcare; life‘s easier when you don‘t worry about how to pay for car repair, childcare, a large heating bill after an especially cold winter month. Financial worry can suck the joy out of life and bring stress, often a trigger for pain and ill health...it‘d be surprising if money did not have its own beneficial effect on health even if much of the link between health & wealth is explained in other ways.

Medicaid has played an important role in making available affordable treatment for people with opioid abuse disorder, with levels of therapy much higher in states that expanded Medicaid after 2014.

•Look at the health of those in states that have expanded Medicaid, versus the states who refuse to do it (many are ‘pro-life states‘). I also liked Andrew Yang‘s vision to treat drug addiction.

It is something in people‘s lives that drives them to seek euphoria or numbness through drugs, not some inherent property of the drugs themselves that will addict anyone who touches them. It is impossible to understand drug use without understanding the environments in which users live, and how those environments are treating them and have treated them in the past.

It is one of the ironies of the epidemic that the US healthcare system, by far the most expensive in the world, not only is failing to prevent the decline in life expectancy but is actually contributing to its fall.

Those who are in the business of treating pain—such as the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture painkillers—have goals of their own that do not always align with the best interests of those who are experiencing pain. Pharma companies have made many billions of dollars from selling drugs to combat pain even as reports of pain have risen with the number of prescriptions written.

We have devices to measure body temperature or blood pressure, but none that can assign a number to pain. It is useful to imagine such a device that could provide an accurate assessment of overall pain. A definition that pain is “whatever the experiencing person says it is” poses obvious problems for disability policy.

The very word labor is often synonymous with pain, as in labor pains or Adam‘s punishment and humankind‘s condemnation to painful toil. The words pain and penalty come from the same Latin root.

Albert Schweitzer said “pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death himself.” The lives of many millions of Americans are compromised by pain; some cannot work, spend time with friends or loved ones, sleep, and do the activities that make daily life possible and fulfilling. Pain can undermine appetite, induce fatigue, and inhibit healing; in extreme cases, it erodes the will to live.

•I know it all too well. 😞☹️🤯

That mortality rates are high in the US for people with less education has long been known. One of the ways that education is protective against a preventable disease is when the way the disease works is understood but when that understanding is more accessible to those with more education.

If we go back a hundred years, those who earned the very highest incomes derived them from capital; they were the inheritors of fortunes from the past. Among those who lived off interest and dividends, it was a badge of shame to have to work for a living. There was no greater disgrace than to have one‘s daughter marry a manufacturer.

The world would be a much worse place without antibiotics, without insulin for diabetes, without aspirin or ibuprofen, without anesthetics, without antihypertensives, without antivirals, or without the birth control pill. The key puzzle for public policy is to find a way of getting the benefits of longer and better lives without socially unacceptable consequences, including, but going beyond, financial costs.

Robin Hood was said to have robbed the rich to benefit the poor. What is happening today in America is the reverse of Robin Hood, from poor to rich, what might be called a Sheriff of Nottingham redistribution. Political protection is being used for personal enrichment, by stealing from the poor on behalf of the rich.

If governments are unwilling to exercise compulsion over health insurance and to take the power to control costs—as other rich countries have done—tragedies are inevitable. Deaths of despair have much to do wry the failure—the unique failure—of America to learn this lesson.

#medicareforallnow

Ordered this months ago and kind of forgot about it. It showed up yesterday on release day. Snuck in right before Amazon started reprioritizing things, I guess. There was already an epidemic of despair and loneliness in this country leading to rising suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism rates. How much worse does the quarantine make it on the people suffering from this the most?