Stossel discusses Canada's health care system
Labels: healthcare, JohnStossel, ObamaAdministration
posted by John Lott at 3:00 PM
9/05/2009
- Name: John Lott
- Location: Virginia, United States
About Me
My commentary on a broad array of economics and crime related issues.
Most of my posts are now at the Crime Prevention Research Center. Our work is very important and you will find the latest information available there. Please click here or go to crimeresearch.org to get that information.
E-mail: johnrlott@crimeresearch.org
Academic Papers
- Terms of Use
Copyright 2005 by John R. Lott, Jr. All rights reserved
My Op-eds
More Books of Mine
Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench
Straight Shooting: Firearms, Economics and Public Policy
Are Predatory Commitments Credible? Who Should the Courts Believe?
Reviews of Freedomnomics
Other Web sites
Previous Posts
- Two of my sons have new pieces
- Where the health care debate currently stands
- The media ignores the extreme statements made by O...
- So the stimulus worked right?
- Judge's statement on parent's extremist religious ...
- New Fox News Op-ed: Serious White House Puts Paren...
- Another piece in the Washington Times
- The U6 measure of unemployment climbs to 16.8 percent
- Good Samaritan justifiably shot the thief in order...
- Why are public school students being asked to help...
Book Reviews
- For a list of book reviews on The Bias Against Guns, click here.
Interesting Past Topics
-Research finding a drop in violent crime rates from Right-to-carry laws
-Ranking Economists
-Interview with the Washington Post
-Debate on "Guns Reduce Crime"
-Appalachian law school attack
-Sources for Defensive Gun Uses
-The Merced Pitchfork Killings
-Fraudulent website pretending to be run by me
-Steve Levitt's Correction Letter
-Ian Ayres and John Donohue
-Other issues regarding Steve Levitt
-National Academies of Science Panel on Firearms
-Baghdad murder rate
-Arming Pilots
-General discussion of my 1997 and 2002 surveys as well as related surveys
-Problems with Wikipedia
-Errata for Gun Books
-US Supreme Court Wire
-Futures for Financial Markets
-judgepedia
Links
Economist and Law Professor David D. Friedman's Blog
Larry Elder's The Elder Statement
Economist Robert G. Hansen's Blog
Firearmstruth.com -- a media-watchdog website
A debate that I had with George Mason University's Robert Ehrlich on guns
Lyonette Louis-Jacques's page on Firearms Regulation Worldwide
An interview concerning More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws
The End of Myth: An Interview with Dr. John Lott
Art DeVany's website, one of the more innovative economists in the last few decades
St. Cloud State University Scholars
Bryan Caplan at George Mason University
Alphecca -- weekly review on the media's coverage of guns
Xrlq -- Some interesting coverage of the law.
Career Police Officer
Gun Law News
Georgia Right-to-Carry
Darnell's The Independent Conservative Blog
Robert Stacy McCain's Blog
Clayton Cramer's Blog
My hidden mathematical ability (a math professor with the same name)
geekwitha45
My Old AEI Web Page
Wrightwing's blog
Al Lowe's blog
St. Maximos' Hut
Dad29
Elizabeth Blackney's blog
Eric Rasmusen
Your "Economics" Portal to the World by Larry Low
William Sjostrom
Dr. T's EconLinks.com
Interview with National Review Online
Blog at Newsmax.com
Pieces I have written at BigGovernment.com
Data
- Johnlott.org
(description of book, downloadable data sets, and discussions of previous controversies)
Updated Media Analysis of Appalachian Law School Attack
Journal of Legal Studies paper on spoiled ballots during the 2000 Presidential Election
Data set from USA Today, STATA 7.0 data set
"Do" File for some of the basic regressions from the paper
7 Comments:
Heroic!!
Excellent!
According to the Salt Lake Tribune we have this: Canada denies health care debacle
Yes it would be "excellent" and "heroic" if this piece had anything to do with any serious healthcare reform proposals for the US. "Cheap shot" or "irrelevent" or "filled with half-truths" would be more accurate.
I'd say it's astonishingly biased, but for Stossel "unbalanced" is a better term.
John, I hope you will remember this example in your ongoing campaign about the "liberal" bias in the mainstream media.
Actually, Pundit, it does have to do with the healthcare "reform" proposed for this country. The Canadian and British systems are held up as models to emulate by the very people that want to "reform" the U.S. health care industry.
Fortunately, they are not worth emulating. No government run program will ever do as well as those run by a competitive free market. Since gov't has no profit motive, they will undercharge anyone still in the free market. When the gov't gets total market share, costs will be cut by making massive cuts in services. That is a rather interesting thing; when the gov't drives out any competition, costs aren't an issue.
Socialism is bad for your health.
Sorry TooMuchTime, you are wrong.
Stossel chose to paint a big scary picture of the horrible things that are wrong with systems that are nothing like what is actually being proposed.
Stossel could have addressed specific proposals made by any number of right, left, or center politicians, but he didn't. He could have talked about market-based reforms. He could have even talked about tort reform. (I'm kind of surprised he didn't go after tort reform... it's pretty rare for Stossel to pass up a chance to show us his shock and dismay and raise his eyebrows in disingenuous incredulity at outrageous jury awards.)
Obviously Stossel is only interested in making points that can be plastered on bumper stickers like "Socialism is bad for your health." And when that's the case, little things like truth and accuracy apparently don't matter.
Dear Pundit:
What exactly did Stossel say that was wrong? You talked about being specific, but I am not sure what you say that is specific.
I didn't say that Stossel said anything "wrong"... what I said was that it was "unbalanced"... and by that I meant that it was both highly skewed and irrational. It has nothing to do with any serious policy proposal in this country and it does not present an accurate picture of healthcare in Canada.
But since you asked, take five minutes to Google Canadian health stats. The Canadian government publishes data like wait times on the Internet here. Stossel claims that the average wait time for an admission 23 hours, but he cites no source. These published statistics show that 87 percent of ED admissions get a bed in 12 hours or less.
(It doesn't provide an overall average wait time, but I did the math. Assuming that for each range of wait times we use the high end of the range, to get to a 23 hour average, 4 percent of Canadians admitted to the hospital would have had to wait for over 18 days for a bed. If that were the case, don't you think Stossel would have lead his story off with those people?)
It took me five minutes to find that data. It took me longer to remember how to HTML code the link to the page than it did to find the data. And as you can see there are hundreds of stats about Canadian healthcare. Stossel only cited one statistic and I proved it false in five minutes. If Canadian healthcare is so awful, why can't he come up with an argument based in facts?
The "experts" Stossel cites are Sally Pipes, head of a conservative "think tank," and David Grazter, the source of Rudy Giuliani's phony cancer statistics. He could have done a story on healthcare reform and gotten any number of credible critics and these are his experts???
Come on, John. There is plenty to debate about healthcare and healthcare reform in this country, but seriously... are we going look to smarmy John Stossel for information? Puh-leez.
Post a Comment
<< Home