Quote Originally Posted by Jeril View Post
Skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, rolling blading, water skiiing, jet skies, ect, all those extra fun things a lot of people like to do. They add to health care costs
Oh, I get you now, I was looking at the wrong half of the equation. It's an interesting point, but I think it's too densely packed to compute, and if we can't compute something I as always recommend drawing no conclusion. Here's what I mean:

-America is rich, therefore we have MRIs, arthroscopic surgery, ligament transplants etc. available for sports injuries, therefore we make use of them. These all cost money but do not impact lifespan. Nation X isn't as rich as us, so they don't have these treatments as available or use them as much, so they spend less but live just as long.

-But... everyone plays. Even cavemen had significant leisure time. And while speed/motorization is a big risk factor for injury, one of the biggest risk factors is lousy equipment/field. I played rec league softball on an artificial turf field that surely cost thousands of dollars; I am reasonably sure that these are not common in Nation X. Surely we agree that poorer people are more likely to find employment as physical labor, and while a torn ACL makes it annoying to sit at a desk, it makes it prohibitively difficult to lift pallets. Unemployment follows, destitution follows, snowball effect.

I'm not even sure how we could design an experiment to evaluate these costs, but if you have suggestions I am all eyes.
and when something bad happens from some of these things and a kid dies young, how many people need to live past the average ages to make up for it?
Like with guns, accidental deaths due to sporting are very rare - surprisingly so, really, especially since (in each case) a lack of coordination and fine motor control seems like it would be catastrophic. If 1 kid out of a million dies 50 years young, you only need the rest of the million to live an extra 26 minutes to balance it out. (Note that they don't have to all live 26 minutes past the average age, but only 26 minutes past what they would have anyway.) Looking at it the other way, 1 kid out of a million dying 50 years young only decreases that million's average lifespan by about half an hour.