In an apparent effort to prove that it has no interest in moving beyond tired DNC talking points in its coverage of the health care reform debate, the Washington Post provides a platform for two of the most disingenuous advocates of government-run health care.
Shannon Brownlee and Ezekiel Emanuel (the latter being the brother of the Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff) use that valuable space to set up a series of 5 straw men, which they knock down with shopworn arguments that have been debunked over and over (and over) again.
I don’t have the time or the inclination to “redebunk” all of them, so I’ll restrict this post to their rote recital of the OECD statistics on infant mortality. They trundle this canard out in an ostensible effort to debunk the “myth” that American health care is the best in the world:
Life expectancy at birth? We rank near the bottom of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just ahead of Cuba and way behind Japan, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada, countries whose governments (gasp!) pay for the lion’s share of health care.
As Brownlee and Emanuel know, the sloppy methodology associated with this OECD ranking renders it meaningless. There are no uniform international standards for collecting and reporting infant mortaility data. In fact, the OECD itself warns against using its data this way:
There is a lack of international agreement on the most promising indicators and many definitions of each indicator that could be adopted. Hence, there is, so far, little possibility of international benchmarking of quality of health care.
But Brownlee and Emanuel aren’t interested in the validity of their data. They want to foist government-run health care on the country, and they will tell any lie they need to tell to make that happen. Sadly, many people who swallow their BS won’t figure out they’ve been had until it’s too late.
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