Health Care BS

The “news” media is already providing fleshy film-maker Michael Moore with plenty of free publicity for his upcoming “documentary” about American health care. The latest example is an interview in Time. Among the softball questions tossed in Moore’s direction was a predictable query regarding his recent trip to Cuba. In response, Moore provided a shopworn lefty talking point about that island’s medical services:

There’s a reason the World Health Organization ranks their health care system among the best in the Third World and that people from Latin America come there for their health care.

Well, as it happens, not everyone is so credulous about W.H.O. statistics. As this Miami Herald article reports, the World Health Organization makes no attempt to verify the numbers provided by Castro’s government:

A spokesman for the Pan American Health Organization, the WHO division that collects statistics in the Americas, says the group doesn’t try to independently verify the numbers. “We rely on the figures the ministries of health send to us,” says PAHO spokesman Daniel Epstein.

And a number of Cuban physicians have warned against uncritical acceptance of Cuban statistics:

Six Cuban doctors — two still on the island, four now in Miami — say no one should trust the country’s health statistics reported to the World Health Organization.

Time, of course, has little interest in factual data. It is content to report Moore’s braying without even a modicum of fact checking, just as the W.H.O. parrots Castro’s propaganda “as read.”