Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world...

Louie

Of course, it turns out they're actually last among developed nations in real health outcomes.

The U.S. ranks #1 among 17 affluent, western countries in the percentage of people aged 5 to 34 who rate their health as good. Unfortunately, when doctors look at people’s actual health, at indicators such as obesity, diabetes, and simply the chance that someone will die before his or her next birthday, the U.S. ranks last: young Americans are #17 out of 17 in real health.

Of course, it turns out they're actually last among developed nations in real health outcomes.

The U.S. ranks #1 among 17 affluent, western countries in the percentage of people aged 5 to 34 who rate their health as good. Unfortunately, when doctors look at people’s actual health, at indicators such as obesity, diabetes, and simply the chance that someone will die before his or her next birthday, the U.S. ranks last: young Americans are #17 out of 17 in real health.

Incorrect. You're comparing apples to oranges. The UK only counts as murders or homicides those crimes which have a conviction; the US counts all deaths which are ruled a homicide. Additionally, the UK counts homicides as occurring when the trial is complete; a murder today may not be counted until 2016, and will be included in the 2016 statistics.

The correct proportion is probably somewhere around 33% or 75% - that is, the US homicide rate is about 33% higher than the UK homicide rate. But given the large number of deaths in the UK with an uncoded cause of death, the homicide rate could very easily be equivalent.

Hmm, do you have a citation that the UK does that? Note that in that case, the difference between the US and UK effective rates will be even smaller, so the difference will be even less than a month. That makes the conclusion that this isn't a major impact on differences in lifespan even stronger.

2TimS13y

What a strange way of doing things. Collecting data in this manner systematically distorts the value of the statistics towards uselessness. (1) Unsolved murders don't get counted at all (2) There's no connection between when a murder occurred and when it is collected as data, because the criminal justice system does not have a predictable timetable from indictment to conviction. Two murders from sequential days could end up on different year tallies simply because of differences in the local courts' calendars. Which makes planning based on past data quite unreliable. Do you have a cite explaining why this strange data collection method is still used? Aren't there coroner's verdicts or some-such?