alt Hacker NewsSure, but it's only six (6) specific illnesses. There are tens of thousands of illnesses. I'm almost 100% confident you could cherry pick any six illenses to get any outcome you want.
Edit: Seems the lead author is also a vocal supporter of universal healthcare, being a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. So yeah, probably why it's such a strange setup, and what compelled me to check since this kind of thing is super common for "activist research".
I guess the takeaway is to always take a study for what it is, rather than what it paints itself to be.
So you are saying that they cherrypicked some obscure illnesses to make Europe look good? They used data for:
- infant mortality
- maternal mortality
- colon and breast cancer survival
- heart attack mortality
- childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia (most common childhood cancer)
Those are one of the most common health issues.
Also, here is another recent paper showing how it’s better (health care wise) to be average in EU than wealthy in US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259