Yeah, you have to be careful applying averages to individuals, especially on extremely complex, multifactorial outcomes like lifespan. This is ESPECIALLY important when looking at populations with large wealth inequality.
The place where you can afford good healthcare, nutritious food, and to live a low stress, physically active lifestyle is likely the best place for someone to live in terms of longevity and quality of life.
You simply cannot compare the life expectancy of a wealthy expat in Mexico to the average life expectancy in Mexico, that would make no sense.
Yep.
Trends across massive populations are a bit questionable to apply to your own life.
For example, it's pretty easy to find far more useful datapoints than "do you live in the USA" - ie this has far more useful visualizations of life expectancy than broad sweeping statements.
Which is why I also sort of agree with @nereo that this is just another way to say "USA sucks."
Life expectancy correlates more closely with wealth than country of residence.
In the UK male healthy life expectancy varied between 53.7 in Blackpool (poor area) and 71.4 years in Richmond on Thames (wealthy area). (2017-19)
Of course there are lots of confounding factors.
I'm pretty sure that moving to a country with a high statistical life expectancy won't change your life expectancy one iota.
Maybe that comparison holds in general, but not for the U.S. The U.S. has the highest median income in the world - and among high GDP countries, it has the lowest life expectancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
"The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries while it far outspends its peers on healthcare ...
The disparity in life expectancy between the U.S. and peer countries persists at older ages ..."
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries
Most high GDP countries like the UK have universal health care, so you might assume the U.S. has it. But the U.S. is the only high GDP country without universal health care.
I assume "The disparity ... persists at older ages" means it is an ongoing problem. When someone moves away from an ongoing problem, that can have an impact.
I find this a bit silly and it leads me to also feel, as @nereo does, that this is just a "hate on USA" approach.
For example, you basically sidestepped the actual point @bill1827 was making entirely to bash on the USA.
The USA also has particularly poor wealth/income inequality compared to the countries you are listing. But if the USA also has high income inequality, it's not surprising at all to me that the USA also would have lower life expectancies (the link above shows pretty conclusively there is a strong relationship between income and life expectancy).
Yep, Canada has serious inequality when it comes to access to care for very remote and indigenous communities, they are just so dramatically out numbered by people living in urban centers that the inequality doesn't play out in the averages.
Even then, I'm in a major city with world class hospitals and 10 minutes from here my mother was in a hospital that isn't even considered up to the standards of first world healthcare. Thank god her brain bleed had no actual treatment aside from supportive ICU care. And because of our system, we had no mechanism to take her to a better hospital.
Access to quality care has such a huge contributing factor to lifespan aggregate data.
In fact, the typical wealthy American has better access to care than the average Canadian. It's just that so many Americans have poor access that they drag the average impact of healthcare down in the aggregate data.
Believe me, many MANY Canadians, especially those of us with complex health issues dream of having the kind of healthcare access that Americans with good access have.
I'm currently going through a major surgery that's similar to another prolific poster here. We had hip issues around the same time, but mine were much more severe. I had to wait nearly a year longer than he did to get surgery and spent that entire year on crutches or in a wheelchair. He was able to fly around the US to find the best surgeon for the job, I was stuck with the Russian roulette Canadian system getting whatever surgeon I got where second opinions aren't usually a realistic option.
It's pure dumb luck that I ended up with a surgeon AND anesthesiologists who understand my other rare health issues, because they could have easily killed or permanently crippled me.
With my illness, if I weren't such a well educated health professional myself, my chances of dying young would be MUCH higher up here in Canada than if I had a lot of money and great insurance in the US.
Canada and the UK's systems are both currently collapsing. Sure, they're better at keeping more people alive, which is great and why we should invest in fixing them instead of letting them collapse and be abandoned, but for an individual with money, aka the typical person on this forum, they could actually put you at significantly higher risk of premature death compared to more unequal systems like in the US or Mexico.
No joke, I'm looking to move to Mexico at least half time so that I can get easier access to specialist care with specialists who actually have time and energy to handle my care properly.
I say this as someone who is an ER frequent flyer. If I didn't know my shit, I could be easily triaged as non-urgent and be left to wait for 12+ hours while slowly bleeding into my brain or from a dissected aorta. Or worse, be turned away from an ER because they don't have enough staff or even worse, the ER could be closed due to not enough staff.
So yeah, let's not look at averages, which include the impacts of wealth inequality, and infant mortality, which is another HUGE factor, and apply them to a bunch of wealthy individuals who survived their own births and childhoods.
That would be as useful as looking at the educational outcomes of the public schools in a given neighbourhood and saying "oh no, we can't live there if we want our kids to be well educated" but the whole time, you're planning to send them to the ultra expensive private school.
It just makes no sense.
