How health expectancy can be increased in the developed world - Essay Example

The paper “How health expectancy can be increased in the developed world” studies a wide array of factors, which can lead to an increase in health expectancy in the developed world. By far the simplest way to guarantee higher health expectancy is to take diseases we already know how to prevent and treat readily and guarantee they are prevented or treated everywhere. In the developed world this means three things: ensuring health care systems exist that allow everyone access to these medicines, enacting lifestyle changes, and persistently ensuring preventative medicine.

The county with by far the highest health expectancy is Japan, followed by other European countries such as France and Germany, while America has among the lowest health expectancies in the developed world. All of the countries at the top of the list vary from countries with low health expectancy, and it stands to reason that these differences may play a part in increased health expectancy, and that these differences if pursued more closely across the board could lead to wide-scale health expectancy increase throughout the entire developed world.

The most obvious difference between countries like Japan, France and Germany and America is access to some form of universal health care. All of the top five countries in health expectancy have some form of socialized health care that allows for some form of universal health coverage, whereas America is just starting to implement plans for universal coverage, and those plans have certainly not yet taken effect. (Raghavan, 89). Universal health care is thus a primary reason for increased health expectancy in some parts of the developed world, and both identifying effective forms of universal health coverage as well as ensuring that every country adopt such as system is essential to improvements in health quality.

Universal coverage increases health expectancy in several ways. The first and possibly most important of these is facilitating access to preventative medicine (Breyer 677). In these countries patients often pay no cost at all for things such as routine check-ups and physicals as well as appointments with general practitioners, meaning that they are more likely to go to doctors when they for both disease screenings and when they show symptoms. People will go to the doctor at the first stages of bronchitis, for instance, rather than waiting until they develop pneumonia, because they have no reason not to go see a doctor.

Furthermore, frequent screenings can help catch a number of diseases before they can do much harm. High blood pressure, cardio-vascular diseases, diabetes and some types of cancer are just a few of the many diseases that can be highly treatable if caught early, but fatal if left too long, so the frequent screenings allowed by universal health care systems means these diseases are more often caught in their infancy in countries which have such systems (Allen 18). Obviously improvements in health care systems are not the only ways to increase life expectancy, nor the only differences between countries with high health expectancy and low.

Other major issues centre on lifestyle, such as diet and exercise. Many studies have shown that unbalanced diets high in saturated and trans fats, something America is renowned for but is becoming a growing problem in other countries such as the UK, can have serious impact on health expectancy and drastically lower both people’s quality of life and life expectancy (Norris 17). Diet, however, is not as simple of a factor as it may seem. One thing that has baffled health care providers for some time is the so called “