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Old 01-21-2008, 08:29 AM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,404,183 times
Reputation: 4013

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
By what possible yardstick would that be true? And how does it affect the flawed comparison of the US and French public health system which constitutes the OP?
Have you read the OP study at all? It is in no way a comparison of the US and French public health systems. It is a comparison of the rates of death from several dozen specific diseases and conditions that are considered amenable in the sense of having their potentially fatal outcomes delayed or even avoided altogether through access to appropriate medical interventions. The study is intended as a complement to data presented in the World Health Report wherein countries are ranked based on disability-adjusted life expectancies. You are attempting to criticize in this study something that it does not undertake.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Pure speculation on your part, underlining the veracity of my point: that any use of illegal immigrants in a study of this kind is by definition haphazard and lends itself to speculative conclusions.
Pure garbage on your part. There is no 'use of illegal immigrants' in the OP study. There is use of statistics formally prepared and recorded concerning deaths and the proximate causes thereof. In your world, we would exclude the deaths of some sectors of society merely over suspicions that their inclusion might tend to make us look bad. This is called 'cooking the books'. This is an example of blatantly dishonest analysis.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
The "10th or13th place" remark is a remarkably accurate paraphrasing of one of saganista's early efforts in this thread.
None that I recall. I did mention 12th place as a possible new ranking for France in the event that your silly heatwave rantings were to be given credence for no more purpose than to put an end to your incessant carping over the matter, noting that even then the US would remain 19th. But I don't recall mentioning either 10th or 13th.
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Old 01-21-2008, 10:39 AM
 
Location: Your mind
2,935 posts, read 4,990,102 times
Reputation: 604
Quote:
Oh, okay. Someone must have just intuited that "satisfaction" stuff that you referred to for the hell of it. All's fair in love, war, and America-bashing...
Here we go.

You said that how healthy people are is more important than how good they think their healthcare is, which is true. I replied by noting that

"judging by both yardsticks appears to produce similar results,"

meaning that people in countries with universal healthcare tend to be both healthier AND think that their healthcare is better -- it doesn't matter which measurement you use.

To this you replied, confusingly

"Meaning that their anecdotal ratings are of questionable value? Agreed."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, how does

A. People in these countries that are more satisfied with their healthcare than Americans also tend to be healthier than Americans on average

imply that

B. "Their anecdotal ratings are of questionable value," any more so than they would be otherwise, without A being true? Instead it seems that A being true would send things in the opposite direction, attaching more legitimacy to public opinion by demonstrating, to some extent, its correctness. Therefore, you make no damn sense.
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Old 01-21-2008, 11:05 AM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,404,183 times
Reputation: 4013
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Exposed as a fraud and a lie. Funded by Soros. More slowballs, please.
I can understand the request. Never invite more than what you are able to handle. The complaint, however, in addition to being off-topic by now, is baseless. Soros was not a funder of the Hopkins/Lancet studies, except by the usual right-wing, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon style of accounting. Each of the two Iraq casualty studies issued appeals for additional support well after they were underway. Particularly in the earlier case, little had been known of what the actual costs would be in operating within an environment utterly lacking in any sort of public safety infrastructure. In the second and larger survey, needs arose re costs resulting from the expansion in scope itself. These calls for additional funding were eventually met by a variety of scholarly resources, one of which was an independent research fund at MIT. That fund itself has various contributors, one of which has been George Soros. At no time during the study were any of the researchers aware of any financial connection to George Soros, and at no time was George Soros aware that funds that he had previously contributed were involved in the Hopkins/Lancet work. From this, however, you conclude that the study was funded by Soros and is therefore bunk. It is this degree of intellectual bias and deliberate carelessness that got us into Iraq in the first place.

As for the studies themselves, the first was a barely cobbled together attempt to do anything at all. Its results are statistically significant, but hardly conclusive, which is exactly what was reported. Problems and all (and they were significant), the 2004 study was still the best and most reliable estimate of excess deaths in Iraq to have been produced through that time. The second study in 2006 was far more rigorous than the first. Lessons learned and the larger scope of operations removed many of the logistical and statistical problems that had plagued the first. Many have of course tried to undermine it, but the 2006 survey still stands as the first rigorous analysis of the degree of human damage actually done in Iraq, and of the degree of sheer falsification that has been used by invasion defenders for now nearly five years.
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Old 01-21-2008, 11:58 AM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,262,341 times
Reputation: 15285
Quote:
Originally Posted by saganista View Post
I can understand the request. Never invite more than what you are able to handle. The complaint, however, in addition to being off-topic by now, is baseless. Soros was not a funder of the Hopkins/Lancet studies, except by the usual right-wing, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon style of accounting. Each of the two Iraq casualty studies issued appeals for additional support well after they were underway. Particularly in the earlier case, little had been known of what the actual costs would be in operating within an environment utterly lacking in any sort of public safety infrastructure. In the second and larger survey, needs arose re costs resulting from the expansion in scope itself. These calls for additional funding were eventually met by a variety of scholarly resources, one of which was an independent research fund at MIT. That fund itself has various contributors, one of which has been George Soros. At no time during the study were any of the researchers aware of any financial connection to George Soros, and at no time was George Soros aware that funds that he had previously contributed were involved in the Hopkins/Lancet work. From this, however, you conclude that the study was funded by Soros and is therefore bunk. It is this degree of intellectual bias and deliberate carelessness that got us into Iraq in the first place.

As for the studies themselves, the first was a barely cobbled together attempt to do anything at all. Its results are statistically significant, but hardly conclusive, which is exactly what was reported. Problems and all (and they were significant), the 2004 study was still the best and most reliable estimate of excess deaths in Iraq to have been produced through that time. The second study in 2006 was far more rigorous than the first. Lessons learned and the larger scope of operations removed many of the logistical and statistical problems that had plagued the first. Many have of course tried to undermine it, but the 2006 survey still stands as the first rigorous analysis of the degree of human damage actually done in Iraq, and of the degree of sheer falsification that has been used by invasion defenders for now nearly five years.
To conclude this deflection from the OP --- so your points are that

1. Soros was one of several sources of funding for this worthless propaganda.

2. The first study was more flawed than the second.

3. Other people exaggerate, too. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

Hardly worth the amount verbiage expended.

From a few right-wing sources (Slate, Wikipedia, The Times):

Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war? - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study - Times Online
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Old 01-21-2008, 12:04 PM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,262,341 times
Reputation: 15285
Quote:
Originally Posted by saganista View Post
No, you wouldn't. Facts are not the essential drivers in your world. Like most right-wingers, you feel free to ignore them whenever expedient from a partisan standpoint. Your purpose in this thread is not to examine fact at all, but rather to defend the dignity of The Flag and Lady Liberty against the insult of crude America-bashers who would suggest that France...France, mind you...outperforms the US by a considerable and persistent margin in terms of preventing amenable deaths. The facts be damned. Surrender is not an option. Sacred honor is at stake here.
Absurd. Your strawman and you are carrying on in a most unbecoming manner.

Quote:
It may or may not be true that you lack credibility, but by far the majority of critical posts in this thread has undermined (quite seriously) the credibility of not you, but your serially foundering arguments. You have chosen to take up a battle against overwhleming odds and are losing it in a rather lop-sided manner. Perhaps in retrospect, this should simply be taken as having been an example of poor decision-making on your part...
If my arguments are foundering, why have you stopped trying to refute them?

Quote:
The C-D cleaning crew cannot have been happy over the rubble of crumbled <yeledaf> claims that has been left strewn about this thread.
If that crew has any appreciation for reasoned argument, it must admire my courage in standing up to three increasingly shrill opponents who have run out of ammunition, and are now throwing little more than spitballs at me.
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Old 01-21-2008, 12:05 PM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,262,341 times
Reputation: 15285
Quote:
Originally Posted by fishmonger View Post
Not when it's unlikely that the group makes up more than 5% of the whole population.
Unlikely but unproven. In some areas it could be plausibly argued that the percentage is much higher, don't you think?
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Old 01-21-2008, 12:29 PM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,262,341 times
Reputation: 15285
Quote:
Originally Posted by saganista View Post
Have we examined the arrangements under which the vacation schedules of French doctors are/were supposedly determined? Perhaps I missed that. Perhaps evidence of selfish 'system rigging' by French doctors was introduced at that time. There is certainly none presented above. I would have wondered in any such discussion whether French demand for medical services in August regularly plunges as potential patients themselves flock to the beaches during that month. Certainly Washington DC experiences ghost-town effects in August, despite the now near universal availability of air conditioning. It would not be surprising to see the same elsewhere.
In other words, you don't know...

Quote:
Otherwise, you might (with any degree of impartiality) have noted that valid criticisms have a marked tendency to fall into the Not Carpet-bombed category. It is typically only the contorted slop that is thrown up by some as if it were valid criticism that receives such treatment.
Valid as determined by whom? You and your shadow? Perhaps the carpet being bombed is beneath a Dell laptop in Georgetown...

Quote:
As for the bloated federal bureaucracy cliche, it is quite true that padding has been added these past seven years, quite in contrast to the streamlining that came about under the Reinvent Government initiatives of the prior administration.
I would describe a bloated bureaucracy at least partially as one whose members have unlimited time to engage in partisan monologues on the internet during working hours.

Quote:
There is no mind making-up to be done. The study is of morbidity rates as those relate to amenable deaths. You hadn't bothered to read the study well enough to understand its purpose or definitions, and hence thought you could make some partisan hay with your overblown heatwave wailings. This despite the fact that worse, though thankfully more localized, outcomes have been observed in the very well air-conditioned US itself. There is nothing in the heatwave chapter of this thread which has any bearing at all on the OP survey methods or outcomes. These still show the US ranking 19th out of 19, just as they did at the start.
And they still ignore the points which I raised, including the age limitations which conveniently excluded the mass of 2003 heat wave deaths, the imprecision with which illegal alein populations are reported and described, and the caution which needs to be obsrved in comparing widely dissimilar nations and cultures for research purposes.

Quote:
It may not, as you suggest, be an integral part of the current topic, but the stuctures of governmental involvement in health care are quite important to the debate over improving health care access and outcomes in the US. The right-wing is ever quick to assume broad-scale nationalization of everything remotely related to medical care when many other models are possible. These folks appear not just unwilling to participate in the debate honestly, but unwilling to conduct the debate at all.
What the right-wing does, and what it is, is no concern of mine. The topic of this thread is a research study which, to reasonable minds, is seriously flawed both in its methodology and its assumption of disinterestedness.

Quote:
The points are rather desperate attempts at the emergency manufacture of silk purses out of sows' ears. Which hazardous occupations typically engaged in by the illegal immigrant community are highly correlated with amenable deaths? Are busboys somehow more susceptible to leukemia? Are landscapers any particular victims of appendicitis? Has an epidemic of Hodgkins Disease broken out amongst agricultural or perhaps meat-packing workers? Is the relationship between undocumented workers and the medical communtiy any different from that of documented workers or of plain old citizens who labor in the same socio-economic strata? Is the US in any case to be excused from responsibility for the effects of its having relegated one person in six to a situation of sharply diminished access to health care? These numbers go far, far beyond even the most overblown estimates of the illegal immigrant population. You have a lot more explaining to do than can be accomplished via the predictable red-herring of illegal immigration.
Sound and fury signifying something of desperation itself. Exposure to agricultural chemicals and persticides, substandard safety regulations in cutting, curing, meatprocessing, manufacturing, and construction occupations, sweatshops, excess overtime, restricted restroom privileges and unsanitary conditions...how far would you like to go? That undocumented workers are subjected to such things is bad enough; to deny that they exist is something quite different, and speaks less about red herrings than willful blue-state ignorance.


Quote:
Unfortunately, what the subject and the majority of related reports and studies have shown is that fewer Americans are alive and enjoying a good level of health than ought be, and that these are fewer as well than in what is in the instant case eighteen out of eighteen other developed countries studied. These disgraceful results, accumulated now as they are over many years, ought to be a call to action. To some instead they are a call only to propaganda. In one ever more desperate wave after another...
No one disputes that the healthcare system in America needs improvement. The families of the victims of the summer of 2003 doubtless said the same about France. However, characterizing the results of one survey, or any number of surveys similarly conducted in the absence of consideration of the (for the umpteenth time in this thread) demographic, geographic, and cultural differences between one huge diverse nation and several relatively tiny, homogeneous ones, as "disgraceful" requires a degree of shamelessness in the level of propaganda which only the "progressive" side of the argument has the gall to exhibit...
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Old 01-21-2008, 12:36 PM
 
Location: Pinal County, Arizona
25,100 posts, read 39,168,834 times
Reputation: 4937
Oh come on you guys! 'Nough already

Look - there is no perfect healthcare system anywhere in the world! Period.

Could the US's be improved? Of course. Could France's be improved? Of course and so on - so, where's the beef.

We have the finest research and development in the areas of healthcare of anywhere - and, when push comes to shove - those in other countries come here.

The key to this entire line of argument however is over a socialized medicine system - like in France versus the type we have in the US.

And when it comes down to it, the United States is not going to go to a single payer / government run system like France, or England, or Canada. If for no other reason but the population we have will not go along with that radical a shift. The other reason is, the litigation alone would stop it from happening for 2 or 3 decades.

So, how about simply letting this arguing stop - and get back to some "normalicy"????
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Old 01-21-2008, 12:52 PM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,262,341 times
Reputation: 15285
Quote:
Originally Posted by fishmonger View Post
Here we go.

You said that how healthy people are is more important than how good they think their healthcare is, which is true. I replied by noting that

"judging by both yardsticks appears to produce similar results,"

meaning that people in countries with universal healthcare tend to be both healthier AND think that their healthcare is better -- it doesn't matter which measurement you use.

To this you replied, confusingly

"Meaning that their anecdotal ratings are of questionable value? Agreed."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, how does

A. People in these countries that are more satisfied with their healthcare than Americans also tend to be healthier than Americans on average

imply that

B. "Their anecdotal ratings are of questionable value," any more so than they would be otherwise, without A being true? Instead it seems that A being true would send things in the opposite direction, attaching more legitimacy to public opinion by demonstrating, to some extent, its correctness. Therefore, you make no damn sense.
This is a direct quote from your post: "...the fact that we have among the lowest satisfaction rates in the developed world for our system.."

In that phraseology, without your later qualifications, my comment is both clear and accurate in that it refers to survey results ("anecdotal ratings"), given the tendency toward general complaint which I described as characterizing American attitudes toward anecdotal surveys, and to which you posed no objection...
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Old 01-21-2008, 12:57 PM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,262,341 times
Reputation: 15285
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greatday View Post
Oh come on you guys! 'Nough already

Look - there is no perfect healthcare system anywhere in the world! Period.

Could the US's be improved? Of course. Could France's be improved? Of course and so on - so, where's the beef.

We have the finest research and development in the areas of healthcare of anywhere - and, when push comes to shove - those in other countries come here.

The key to this entire line of argument however is over a socialized medicine system - like in France versus the type we have in the US.

And when it comes down to it, the United States is not going to go to a single payer / government run system like France, or England, or Canada. If for no other reason but the population we have will not go along with that radical a shift. The other reason is, the litigation alone would stop it from happening for 2 or 3 decades.

So, how about simply letting this arguing stop - and get back to some "normalicy"????
Your point is quite reasonable.

Unfortunately it is obviously "normal" for the left-wingers on this board to seek to discredit any conservative opinion which dissents from their collective mind-set, to seek motivations for that dissenting opinion from among racism, ignorance or greedy corporatism, and to express themselves at unreasonable length, and with increasing shrillness and frustration, when none can be uncovered.
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