Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index – 2019 edition

https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/spain-tops-italy-as-world-s-healthiest-nation-while-u-s-slips

by gfiorav • 7 years ago

90 51 7 years ago

JaumeGreen4• 7 years ago

"Primary care is essentially provided by public providers, specialized family doctors and staff nurses, who provide preventive services to children, women and elderly patients, and acute and chronic care,"

The public healthcare here in Spain has an endemic problem of ever reducing budgets, and it's so saturated (because of that) that most people that can also get private healthcare. When politicians touch that is to reduce the budget even further.

Yet people think that the main problems in Spain are other things... damn the propaganda machine.

nairboon• 7 years ago

So what are the main problems in Spain, according to what most people think? (I'm not very familiar with Spain)

adrinavarro• 7 years ago

National politics (Catalonia, etc). But there's also an endemic issue with spending on unnecessary infrastructure while underfunding heavily used infrastructure (such as public transportation in large cities); our budgets never seem to be able to reduce debt, and our pension system is doomed to explode, because eventually there will be more retired than working people.

manuelflara3• 7 years ago

Sadly, the political landscape has been pretty much monopolized by the Catalonian independence issue, with politicians using it as a smoke screen to cover way more important issues like constant corruption scandals, rampant privatization of health care, double-digit yearly increases in utility bills, housing rent bubble, etc.

manuelflara3• 7 years ago

Indeed, the public healthcare system in Spain, while still great compared to most of the world, is a shadow of what it once was, with the rampant privatization done by the Government in the last decade. A really sad situation. That being said, decent private healthcare here is about 100€/month, so while private healthcare is still considered "a luxury" (because public one is pretty good), it's still very very far from the cost of US private healthcare.

antr7• 7 years ago

Rampant privatization?

Spain's public healthcare expenditure[1] was:

    38.552 €bn in 2002, and
    66.678 €bn in 2016 (latest official year),

this is a 73% increase in 14 years.

On other hand while population was

    41.31 m in 2002, and
    46.48 m in 2016,

A 13% increase. This is a 53% net increase in expenditure per capita. I'm curious to know what "rampant privatization" to you means, as government/public expenditure has by no means slowed down, quite the contrary.

In my opinion, healthcare expenditure is out of control. But that is a completely different debate.

[1] http://www.mscbs.gob.es/en/estadEstudios/estadisticas/inforR...

melenaboija3• 7 years ago

Spanish healthcare is among the best in the world despite the problems.

Also, quite bold calling propaganda a report from United Nations analyzing population health. What do other problems the country has have to do with the people health?

Maybe your comment contains some propaganda too.

JaumeGreen4• 7 years ago

I think you misundertood my comment.

Propaganda is what is done in Spain to make people look at fake problems instead of the real ones.

I don't think this report is propaganda.

bostonpete• 7 years ago

Wow, that's surprising to me because of smoking alone. When I lived there briefly in the early 90s, it seemed like everyone smoked. I wonder if that's changed dramatically or is just drowned out by other metrics...

manuelflara3• 7 years ago

I'm Spanish and live here and I'd say people smoke a lot less than they used to after laws were passed a few years ago banning smoking from pretty much any indoor space that isn't residential. I know few people who smoke and those who do don't smoke _a lot_. French people on the other hand, pretty much every person I know, even here living in Barcelona, smokes like crazy.

WhiteSage• 7 years ago

It did change! In fact now smoking is prohibited near schools and inside bars and clubs. Some people smoke, but not almost everybody as before.

nkozyra• 7 years ago

I remember people smoking everywhere in the US, too, though.

In fact, moving to NYC I was struck by how I still saw people smoking because of how infrequent it was elsewhere

lordnacho• 7 years ago

This seems to have massively changed all over Europe. When I was a kid in the 90s you could go into bars that were foggy with smoke. TV characters would do it.

Nowadays it's generally not cool anymore, it's seen as a vice and people will sdmit so when they ask if it's okay.

close04• 7 years ago

The laws changed and smoking inside public spaces was all but abolished. There are still holdouts in the countries that passed these laws more recently but the trend is clear and it's acceleration.

I also noticed that one big factor that actually worked in discouraging teens from even starting is the "uncool" image built around smoking.

Unfortunately it look like the coolness factor is moving to electronic cigarettes and there's not much data to discourage the use yet.

alfonsodev• 7 years ago

and begging of 2000s, my first job as programmer was in a small design company(<10 employees), people were smoking at the office while working, it really suck to come back home with smelling clothes, it wasn't until 2006 when it became forbidden to smoke at work and other public places like bars or restaurants (with some exceptions if they have special space for smokers and enough size).

Besides that, sun light is very healthy, we see all the time articles about vitamin D, I think the way of living of Italians and Spanish of being more in the outside because the good weather might influence too, hard to know for sure.

collyw2• 7 years ago

Number 40 on this list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cigarette...

afpx• 7 years ago

What's going on with Luxembourg? 6330.9 cigarettes, per person, per year (which is over six times the US consumption). And, they're ranked still 11th on the Bloomberg list.

samat• 7 years ago

Love how 'click HERE' is not a link.

To access the Bloomberg 2019 Healthiest Country Index data set for all nations, click HERE.

olcor• 7 years ago

The article seems to have been taken from the main Bloomberg site: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-24/spain-top...

The "click here" link is for terminal subscribers only so I guess Quint might not have been able to resolve it properly.

yogeshlor• 7 years ago

Plus the browser back button is hacked. Can't comeback to hacker news

eyebrowser95• 7 years ago

I think Bloomberg did an oopsie..

jug• 7 years ago

Wow. Russia looks worse off than I thought. Congrats, you share Egyptian health standards.

fedups• 7 years ago

I'd be curious how individual US states stack up here--it seems like there would be quite a bit of variance (and I'm sure the US isn't the only country whose stats become much less informative when aggregated to a single number).

thinkcontext• 7 years ago

https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2017-an...

Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index – 2019 edition

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