Comment on Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:52:32 GMT

What I don't understand is that you can attach a 63% probability to a decline of at least 60%, but at most a 7% probability to a decline of, let's say, 20%-60% (can we agree that a 20% decline would count as a "market slump"?).

They're separate predictions.

The Wikipedia page on this stuff says that the WHO hasn't been publishing rankings since 2000 (which I think actually makes your prediction pretty meaningless), and that the factors it purports to weigh up are health as measured by disability-adjusted life expectancy, responsiveness as measured by "speed of service, protection of privacy, and quality of amenities", and what people have to pay. I don't see anything in there that cares about national health databases (except in so far as they advance those other very reasonable-sounding goals).

I went through its ranking criteria about a decade ago, and the database thing came up in every single ranking, dropping even our top-caliber cancer treatment to merely average.

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