Analytics Stories

CHAPTER 21What Is the Worst Health Care Problem in My Country?

The well-known author Augusten Burroughs is credited with saying, “When you have your health, you have everything.” Until the 1990s, there was no way to compare the health of different areas of the world and no way to measure how much a given health problem (heart disease, low back pain, etc.) reduced a nation's health. Largely due to the amazing efforts of Dr. Alan Murray (see Jeremy Smith, Epic Measures, Harper, 2015), we can now compare the “healthiness” of different countries and understand how different maladies affect the health of a country. If you want to understand how health in the world is measured and how different “unhealthiness” is in different regions of the world, please read “Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) for 291 Diseases and Injuries in 21 Regions, 1990–2010: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010” (Christopher Murray et al., The Lancet, vol. 380, December 2012, pages 2197–2223). We will often refer to this article using the abbreviation DALY2012.

Disability-Adjusted Life Years

Murray's key metric is Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY). DALY is the sum of years of life lost due to early death (YLL) and years lost due to disability (YLD).

YLL are computed based on the average life expectancy in the country with the longest life expectancy. (Japan ranks #1; the United States ranks #31!) Japanese women have a life expectancy of 87 years. If a woman dies of cancer ...