Ben Shapiro: American Healthcare Is Great if You Ignore All the Death

Skittish conservative big brain Ben Shapiro would like the American public to know that life expectancy in the United States is great—just great!—so long as you ignore all the death and stuff.

Speaking on his radio show on Friday, Shapiro addressed the previous evening’s Democratic presidential primary debate, and its focus on America’s abysmal healthcare system, by touting the country’s life expectancy—which has been declining for the past three years due to drug overdoses, liver disease, and suicide according to the Center for Disease Control. Shapiro described as “pretty good when you take out all the confounding factors.”

Those “confounding factors,” per Shapiro, are things like auto accidents, murders, and people taking their own lives. In other words, a whole lot of actual death.

Shapiro’s argument about the “pretty good”-ness of the American healthcare landscape is further muddled by the fact that suicide—which he and the CDC both agree is a major factor in the U.S. declining life expectancy rates—is very much a public healthcare issue that’s been on the steep incline since 1999. It’s also clearly connected to America’s gun crisis, as is the homicide rate. But that’s another big problem Shapiro probably does not want to discuss.