Cut That Out

Dr. Richard Deming should use the Cyberknife to cut out the misinformation he spreads and the scientific community is united in that fact.

In a letter to the Ragister, Deming stated...

"Nearly 45,000 uninsured Americans die annually as a consequence of not having insurance. That's one needless death every 12 minutes".

Ironically, I was sitting, with my mother, not far from Deming's office when I read his letter and laughed out loud.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Facts are stubborn things -- Ronald Reagan

Michelle Malkin gives the history of this lie...

Data was used from a health survey conducted between 1988 and 1994. The questionnaires asked a sample of 9,000 participants whether they were insured and how they rated their own health. The federal Centers for Disease Control tracked the deaths of people in the sample group through the year 2000. Himmelstein, Woolhandler and company then crunched the numbers and attributed deaths to lack of health insurance for all the participants who initially self-reported that they had no insurance and then died for any reason over the 12-year tracking period.

The authors admit, "Our study has several limitations," the authors concede. The survey data they used "assessed health insurance at a single point in time and did not validate self-reported insurance status. We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview."

Malkin continues...

The single-payer advocate-authors also conceded in their study limitations section that "earlier population-based surveys that did validate insurance status found that between 7 percent and 11 percent of those initially recorded as being uninsured were misclassified. If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample."

To boil it all down in plain English: The single-payer scientists had no way of assessing whether the survey participants received insurance coverage between the time they answered the questionnaires and the time they died. They had no way of assessing whether the deaths could have been averted with health insurance coverage.

Thank goodness Deming is a much better Doctor than a statistician, he treated my friend Cal (Freedom's pal), but he could learn a lesson about quality from another Dr. Deming from Iowa.