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NoGamesTolerated I wonder about it too.
The more you look at it the more it raises questions.
I can believe the general point but not the massive death-rate; and it does not define "health insurance" hence the "lack of" it.
I assume the diagram is from someone somewhere trying to tell us the USA offers only commercial health services, with no national health service as operates in so many other nations. So, the same unknown source is presumably trying to tell us many (really, nearly half a million?) Americans die each year because they cannot afford medical insurance or treatment.
I thought the USA does have a very basic national service for the very poorest who cannot afford hospital fees, but I don't know its extent and details. Also, we'd know relative situations of preventative medicine, health education and ways of life, for any such statistics to mean much.
All the countries named
including the USA have "health insurance" of some sort; whether commercial, State welfare services or as in the UK, both. Where only commercial health services are available they are not affordable to many people; or some who can afford it remain untreated by falling foul of insurers' exclusions designed to minimise pay-outs, hence maximise profits.
Also, the numbers quoted look suspiciously exact for a mean value of many high numbers, but may only be by simple, purely-arithmetical rounding to an integer. More importantly, over how many years have the statistics for all those nations been examined; and factors such as the Covid pandemic accommodated?
Thirdly, what of other factors that will influence untimely fatalities by illness; such as relative natures and levels of preventative medicine, health education and ways of life? What if of two countries of similar levels of health provision and costs-of-living, the residents of one live fairly abstemiously on reasonably good diets but those of the other largely neglect themselves?
This could affect commercial health cover. An insurer's primary task it to make money not make people well; so may well charge higher premiums or even exclude those who limit their own lives by being under-nourished, over-weight, hard-drinking smokers. Would such cases - the needless premature fatalities by heart-attacks etc. - therefore bias the "lack of insurance" claim, by the insurance existing but excluding those people?
What are the sums based on? Genuinely no insurance, commercial or state? Or insurance existing but too expensive or exclusive for many people?
That diagram alone seems based on either very poor statistics or good statistics badly handled or even wilfully misreported.
It would be interesting to read the source so we know what it is really trying to say. I don't suppose the source is a medical-insurance company...?
