DAVID BROOKS IS STILL BABBLING

I caught a few minutes of his appearance on the 5/20/2010 Huge Ego Hewitt Show and he came out with these statistics:

Fifty years ago, Swedes on average lived 2.7 years longer than Americans. So the Swedes built a big welfare state, big, national health care service. We didn’t. We went a different direction. And what was the result after fifty years? Swedes lived 2.7 years longer than the average American. No difference at all.

I found this a hard to believe so I went to the UNDATA site and found the historical life expectancies for Sweden and the U.S. Here's a chart from that database:

The dates on the X-axis refer to 5 year groupings, so 1950 really refers to 1950-55, 1955 refers to 1955-1960 and 1960 refers to 1960-65.

First note that Brooks was wrong about the gap in 1960, no matter which grouping we use. For the 1955-60 group, Swedish LE is exactly 3 years greater than the U.S. For the 1960-65 group, the difference is 3.5 years. This is a minor point but it's good to be a stickler with these aholes.

The real important point is that Sweden didn't begin universal health beginning in 1960 (50 years ago), it began about 1900. What did change since 1965 was America's system: Medicare and Medicaid, both socialized approaches to health care. In time, these two programs seem to have led a marked decrease in Sweden's LE advantage.