Most of the rest is just from hygiene (doctors washing hands between patients is an application of preventing cross-contamination, same as we all routinely do in food preparation).
Those two together are responsible for more than 76% of the total improvement. The remaining less than 24% is split roughly equally between:
- Police & Fire departments
- Improvements in civil engineering (buildings & bridges don't collapse; compare to many recent news stories from 3rd world countries)
- Laws & regulations that intervene in the marketplace to reduce the freedom of some people to maximize their profits by poisoning us all with pollution.
- Alleviation of rank malnutrition (somewhat walked back over the past few decades by the anti-science Cult of the Low Fat Diet).
- The Medical Sector of the economy, which markets itself as "healthcare".
So, healthcare accounts for less than 10%, and probably closer to 5% of the total improvement in health from 150 years ago til now. But wait, it's even worse than that! Virtually 100% of healthcare's contribution is just from the ER. You get shot or stabbed, or suffer from smoke inhalation during a house fire, or something like that; all through human history until recently, that would have ended your life. Now they can prevent your death until you have time to heal, and you might live for decades more.
In other words, the effect of everything else that healthcare does - vaccines, cholesterol-lowering drugs, anti-depression medications, the cut/poison/burn business model of cancer treatment (surgery/chemo/radiation), etc. - does not rise to statistical significance.
BOTTOM LINE: We, the USA, get literally NOTHING in return for MOST of the money we as a nation spend on "healthcare" every year.
The Dreaded "Socialized Medicine"
Yes, we should have a single-payer national healthcare system - but ONLY for the ER. This would save our country bigly money, and improve the lives of millions of people. (ONLY for citizens, of course.)
For long-term health creation and maintenance, the medical sector of the economy, as currently constituted, is actively harmful.
Fortunately, there are things you as an individual can do to take care of your own health & fitness:
How to sync diet with exercise
Most cancer can be prevented with nutrition
An easy AND FREE way to reduce and maybe even eliminate back pain
Drug-free ways to raise your testosterone
Signaling: the science of nutrigenomics - no DNA test required!
