A New York Times journalist with a health care stat is like a toddler with a loaded pistol. The combination of intellectual underdevelopment and sophisticated weaponry is a recipe for mayhem. Anyone doubting this should read Nicholas Kristof’s recent column, A Short American Life (subscription required). Among its many risible assertions is the following:
The U.S. now spends far more on medical care than other nations, yet our infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate and longevity are among the worst in the industrialized world. If we had as good a child mortality rate as
France, Germany and Italy, we would save 12,000 children a year.
This passage is a cornucopia of misinformation, but the most egregious statistical distortion involves infant mortality. Kristof is, of course, merely parroting a cliché he has picked up on the cocktail circuit, but the matter nonetheless deserves more serious consideration. A good place to find that is in this analysis by David Hogberg:
Infant mortality is measured far too inconsistently to make cross-national comparisons useful. Thus, just like life expectancy, infant mortality is not a reliable measure of the relative merits of health care systems.
This isn’t news to people who have actually bothered to do the reading, but I suppose Kristof is just too busy to deal with such mundane and tedious activities as fact-checking. It would appear that his editors are equally encumbered.
I guess it would be a violation of the First Amendment to require journalists to get a license before allowing them to use statistical data.
Comments 1
Great point. And great link to Hogberg. He confirms the point that health care has little affect on longevity. Is this perhaps not the principal underlying cause of so much healthcarebs? That is the hubris that brings about medical nemesis.
Posted 25 May 2007 at 3:32 am ¶Post a Comment