AlchemyToday

On health care, Bill Kristol doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  He was just on the Daily Show where he said that the United States millitary has the best health care in the country and said, “I’m not sure the VA, for example, which is another government agency has the best health care.  I’m not sure Medicade and Medicare which are government programs provide the absolute best health care.”

Bashing the VA is ignorant and unfortunatley quite common.  It has its roots in complaints about the treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, that’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and it’s not a part of the VA.  In fact, the VA provides care for almost 8 million Americans at a cost of $45 billion per year.  That works out to under $6000/person.  The national average is $8000/person.  While saving $2000/person, the VA provides a level of care that’s better than that received by most Americans in every measurable category.  Expanding the VA to be the United States’ National Health Service would unquestionably increase the quality of care for the vast majority of Americans and go a long way towards avoiding the impending catastrophe of increased health costs.  The down side is that insurance companies and medical providers would go out of business and drug companies would have to stop relying on America for the entirety of their profits around the world.  In reality, Kristol is worried about this downside and doesn’t really believe that quality of care will suffer or that government healthcare can’t work.  He should probably pick an example closer to reality for his bogeyman, though.

Over at the Corner, Jim Manzi back up his colleague Mark Steyn’s appraisal that, “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”  What he’s saying is that if you are 29 you graduated in 1998 and that if you are graduating high school you were starting 1st grade in 1998–which was warmer than average (the second warmest year ever); there has been only one warmer year since and last year was not it.  Ergo, look at these two endpoints and there’s been no global warming for a decade!  Fortunately, we have many more than two data points.  If you look at all of the available data and subject it to a linear fit, you’ll find the following rates of global warming:

1999-2009: 1.52 degrees C/century

1960-2008: 1.34 degrees C/century

Jim Manzi looks at these graphs and says, “The funny thing is that if you zoom in on about the last ten years, you see this: There has not been a lot of measured warming for the last ten years.”  In fact, global warming has been faster over the past 10 years than it has over the past half century; in other words, the best evidence that we have shows that global warming is happening and is accelerating.  If you fit the 1960-2008 data to a second order polynomial, the rate of global warming is increasing by 0.02 degrees/century every year.

The only way to look at the data and come to the conclusion shared by Mark Steyn, George Will, and Jim Manzi is to be ignorant or knowingly deceitful.

Tonight Obama fielded two questions that should be a cinch to answer.  First, from Steve Koff at the Plain Dealer:

One, can you guarantee that this legislation will lock in and say the government will never deny any services, that that’s going to be decided by the doctor and the patient, and the government will not deny any coverage?

Then from Jake Tapper at ABC:

But experts say that in addition to the benefits that you’re pushing, there is going to have to be some sacrifice in order for there to be true cost-cutting measures, such as Americans giving up tests, referrals, choice, end-of-life care.

When you describe health care reform, you don’t — understandably, you don’t talk about the sacrifices that Americans might have to make. Do you think — do you accept the premise that other than some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, the American people are going to have to give anything up in order for this to happen?

The answer here is obvious: Do you and your doctor get everything you want and everything that’s best for your care in the current system?  Do you really have choice?  No.  Your insurance company will decline claims all the time for questionable medical reasons.  A public plan will ensure that doctors will make these decisions based on effectiveness and not profitability.  On top of that, millions of Americans don’t get to make these decisions at all because they aren’t insured and they will be with insurance reform.  And the plans on the table now require preventative care and early detection testing that aren’t always covered by insurance.  It’s not about what will be taken away but about what’ll be gained.

Bernd Beber has responded to my (and others’) criticisms of his article on suspected Iranian election fraud authored with Alexandra Scacco.  An annotated and updated version of the article is available.

A key criticism leveled against Alex Scacco’s and my Washington Post op-ed on the election in Iran is that we argue that a fair election is unlikely to produce a lot of variation in last-digit frequencies, but then use an inappropriate test in evaluating the data from Iran against this claim. We should have reported the results from a chi-square test, not the probability of particular digits occurring more or less often than expected.

Is a chi-square test the most appropriate statistic for this type of data? Yes. That’s exactly why we report the result in the annotated version of our op-ed. (We initially reported only a nearly equivalent test statistic involving the standard deviation of last-digit frequencies, but since then we’ve clarified that this is the same result one obtains from a chi-square test.)

But is this test the most appropriate one for a general audience? Only if there isn’t a more transparent alternative that captures the same intuition and gives the same substantive result. In our view, the test statistic we report is precisely such an alternative.

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From Baltimore’s fireworks show last night.

Of course the plural of anecdote isn’t really data, but that won’t stop Mark Steyn from spinning the tragic death of a cancer patient in the UK into an indictment of public health care:

When we quote stories like these at NRO, we get a lot of e-mail saying these are just “anecdotes”. And yes, if you look on yourself as being part of a government health system of millions of people, getting a bedsore and dying in hideous pain is no big deal in the scheme of things. But I look on myself as being part of the Mark Steyn health system. So if I get a bedsore and die, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a 100% systemic failure. The difference between government health care and a private system is that, under the latter, you’re free to say, “This dump’s filthy. I’m going to the state-of-the-art joint five miles up the road.” You may have to get out your checkbook, but ultimately the decisions are yours.

The problem is that there actually is data to look at here, gathered by the OECD.  And while I realize Steyn’s tongue is in his cheek, bedsores aren’t just a rare problem in the UK or in the United States.  Thousands of patients die in the United States each year from this almost entirely preventable problem.

In fact, the rate of death from medical misadventures (including bedsores) is 40% higher in the United States than the UK.  It’s higher than every OECD country except Australia, Austria, Greece, and Iceland (I would guess that Italy, Portugal, and Turkey might also compete here, but they don’t have 2004 data).

Beyond that, the “Mark Steyn health system” exists in the UK, too, and out-of-pocket, uninsured costs are lower or the same than in the United States.  As a related example, the cost of removal of a breast lump is £1,200 – £2,000 in the UK ($2,000-$3300) and over $3,000 at one American hospital.

Mark’s also fascinated with maggot therapy:

That’s not a bug, it’s a… No, wait: It’s a bug and a feature! The maggot is apparently the leech of 21st century government health care. But, as with everything else, there weren’t enough of them.

Boy, that sounds scary!  As it turns out, this therapy was developed at Johns Hopkins, reintroduced by the VA, and is used in hundreds of American hospitals (not just unleashed on patients on the government dole, either).  A gross and awesome video of maggot therapy below the fold.

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Billboard reads: “Sling some rocks at Chocoliath”

I spotted this billboard (for Snickers I guess?) from the bus yesterday.  I suspect that, despite the intended joke, advertisements about slinging rocks are tone deaf in a city that may be more devestated by drug abuse than any other.  I’m usually not all that PC.

Driving into work, I looked out the window and saw water spurting 30 feet into the air out of a manhole thanks to flash flooding and grabbed a video.  Pretty amazing.  I didn’t get much of the lightning, but that was something else, too.

You know, I’ve only spent a little bit of time in Paris, but you have to harbor some serious francophobia to come away with this impression:

The French do not much like children [off with a bang]. Restaurant meals are available at very limited hours. You want lunch — it had better be between 12 and 2 [aka lunchtime]. Miss that and you can have a snack — but only if you are in a place big enough to have a range of restaurant types [and/or street vendors, bakeries, groceries, etc, etc which are ubiquitous in any "place" in France]. Dinner starts at 7 [aka dinnertime], no matter that you missed lunch and want a burger or a salad at 5, not ice cream or a beer. And meals take forever. I like the leisurely lunch as much as any journalist, of course. But not with my kids, every day — which leaves us with grilled-cheese sandwiches, hold the ham. Oh, you can’t hold the ham? Thanks [clearly this anecdote is relevant].

Finally, there is a lot of bad food in France — especially around tourist sites, including the great museums [the prepared food in the Met and the Smithsonian is fantastic and cheap, right?]. I will not say what I paid for two sandwiches and two salads [ignoring who's responsible for the weak dollar; food in Paris was astonishingly cheap in 2001] — all premade so unwanted ingredients could not be removed in advance — and a few soft drinks at the Louvre, after braving the crowds to see the Mona Lisa (which attracts tour buses full of people eager to take group pictures of themselves in front of the picture [doesn't failing to visit the Liberty Bell disqualify one for employment at the National Review?]). There is much excellent food, of course. But who wants really excellent food every day [everyone]? Sometimes you just want to get everyone fed and get on with your activities. Fast food exists because a mediocre, entirely predictable burger from McDonald’s is no worse than what you would get a certain percentage of the time at individual places that might not be as clean and certainly won’t be as quick [I love McDonald's... but clean?]. There is an obvious open niche for a service-oriented place that downplays the drama and provides reasonably healthy food in a clean setting. And as for the health claim — I don’t personally buy it [Buy what?  That it's a good idea to have a healthy diet?]. But I am currently in a region where every farmers’ market, farm stand, and café sells foie gras, duck confit, and excellent high-fat cheeses, and what passes for a vegetable in restaurants is potatoes sautéed in duck fat [Who claimed French cuisine was healthy?]. A few carrot sticks and an apple and Mickey D wins that one — so no surprise that it’s doing well.

I really hope her kids enjoy their sabotaged McVacation.