NYT’s Numbers on the Dark

Libertarians, conservatives and health-care wonks have been disputing the numbers supporting Michael Moore’s Sicko thesis for some time. But, of course, those objections aren’t real until a Harvard Professor writes about them in the New York Times:

WITH the health care system at the center of the political debate, a lot of scary claims are being thrown around. The dangerous ones are not those that are false; watchdogs in the news media are quick to debunk them. Rather, the dangerous ones are those that are true but don’t mean what people think they mean.

Here are three of the true but misleading statements about health care that politicians and pundits love to use to frighten the public:

STATEMENT 1 The United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canada, which has national health insurance.

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STATEMENT 2 Some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance.

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STATEMENT 3 Health costs are eating up an ever increasing share of American incomes.

HIs refutation of each statement should sound familiar. We’ve been making these refutations on Moorewatch all year long. But it’s nice for the NYT to finally get with the times. Stay tuned for the NYT to be shocked, shocked!, to find that there are long waits for surgery in the UK.