A new report was released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week. It provides the best proof to date of the Hispanic Paradox -- which until this morning I had never heard of either, and would have guessed had something to do with how Latinos are incapable of tampering with the space-time continuum in Star Trek. But it turns out that, despite the fact that American Hispanics are poorer and more obese and disproportionately lack access to health care compared with whites and blacks, they nonetheless live longer.
According to the AP, "A Hispanic born in 2006 could expect to live about 80 years and seven months. Life expectancy for a white person is about 78, and just shy of 73 for a black person."
But wait a second. According to just about everybody who supported Obamacare, one of the main reasons we desperately needed to Saletanize the economy and our personal liberties was to improve life expectancy. Heck, Michael Bloomberg once said on Meet the Press that the very purpose of government is to extend life expectancy. If only the Founders knew that, they would have ditched the Federalist Papers and written a manual on how to put everyone on a respirator.
One of the beauties of the G-File is that I don't have to run through all the quotes from Obama, Clinton, Clinton, Pelosi, and Reid -- not to mention Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and the whole gang -- about how central improving life expectancy was to the whole rationale for Obamacare. You can just take my word for it.
And yet it turns out that one of the populations most obviously in "need" of socialized medicine, according to the Democrats -- Hispanics -- is already outliving people with greater access to health care. To quote Ralph Wiggum, that's unpossible!
Except it's entirely natural. No, I don't know why Hispanics have better life expectancy than whites. I could offer some guesses about diet, family life, the benefits of physical labor, or simply genetics, but they would all be guesses. (One theory mentioned in one of the stories is that Hispanic immigrants tend to be disproportionately healthy compared with their home populations.) The simple fact is life expectancy varies for a lot of reasons, and access to health care is at best one factor among many. In fact, some estimate that if you simply exclude the Americans who die from car crashes and homicide, America has the best life expectancy in the West.
Back when the Obamacare debate was still raging, Britain's life expectancy was 79.4 years, America's was 78.2 and Cuba's 78.3. Cuba and Britain have socialized medicine, America not so much. Does anyone think these tiny discrepancies will be solved by the individual mandate and the ability to keep kids on their parents' plans until they're 26? Is it worth trillions to move that number ever-so-slightly? Meanwhile, Asian-American women have a life expectancy of 87 years (in Bergen County, N.J., it's 91 years -- again, for Asian-American women). In fact, Asian-American women live three years longer than women in Japan -- the country with the best life expectancy. At the same time, Indians in South Dakota have the lowest life expectancy, even though they've had access to the Indian Health Service for decades.
By all means, investigate the Hispanic Paradox, but don't call it a paradox. It's just another one of the many fascinating faces of human diversity.
According to the AP, "A Hispanic born in 2006 could expect to live about 80 years and seven months. Life expectancy for a white person is about 78, and just shy of 73 for a black person."
But wait a second. According to just about everybody who supported Obamacare, one of the main reasons we desperately needed to Saletanize the economy and our personal liberties was to improve life expectancy. Heck, Michael Bloomberg once said on Meet the Press that the very purpose of government is to extend life expectancy. If only the Founders knew that, they would have ditched the Federalist Papers and written a manual on how to put everyone on a respirator.
One of the beauties of the G-File is that I don't have to run through all the quotes from Obama, Clinton, Clinton, Pelosi, and Reid -- not to mention Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and the whole gang -- about how central improving life expectancy was to the whole rationale for Obamacare. You can just take my word for it.
And yet it turns out that one of the populations most obviously in "need" of socialized medicine, according to the Democrats -- Hispanics -- is already outliving people with greater access to health care. To quote Ralph Wiggum, that's unpossible!
Except it's entirely natural. No, I don't know why Hispanics have better life expectancy than whites. I could offer some guesses about diet, family life, the benefits of physical labor, or simply genetics, but they would all be guesses. (One theory mentioned in one of the stories is that Hispanic immigrants tend to be disproportionately healthy compared with their home populations.) The simple fact is life expectancy varies for a lot of reasons, and access to health care is at best one factor among many. In fact, some estimate that if you simply exclude the Americans who die from car crashes and homicide, America has the best life expectancy in the West.
Back when the Obamacare debate was still raging, Britain's life expectancy was 79.4 years, America's was 78.2 and Cuba's 78.3. Cuba and Britain have socialized medicine, America not so much. Does anyone think these tiny discrepancies will be solved by the individual mandate and the ability to keep kids on their parents' plans until they're 26? Is it worth trillions to move that number ever-so-slightly? Meanwhile, Asian-American women have a life expectancy of 87 years (in Bergen County, N.J., it's 91 years -- again, for Asian-American women). In fact, Asian-American women live three years longer than women in Japan -- the country with the best life expectancy. At the same time, Indians in South Dakota have the lowest life expectancy, even though they've had access to the Indian Health Service for decades.
By all means, investigate the Hispanic Paradox, but don't call it a paradox. It's just another one of the many fascinating faces of human diversity.
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